Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Not to mention Galway city.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. I have the privilege of representing a very varied community from the Aran Islands, Inisbofin, Connemara, Galway city, right down south Mayo.

The sterile debate between rural and urban is very worrying for me. It is boring but it is also worrying and dangerous in creating a divide where we all need to be together to face the challenges that affect all of us from housing to climate change.

This is a five-year policy. One could not but praise this document. However, now we are two and a half years through it. It contains 150 commitments with no times for any of those to be achieved. The Minister, and her predecessor, have done many good things and it was a very good decision to set up the Department. Let me get the good wishes out the way, and then look at what is not being done because there are 150 commitments without a time set out. The biggest difficulty for me is that there is no rural proofing. I understand there are pilot projects under way around that but, like poverty proofing, this document is only as good as where it has been rural proofed. Yesterday, or maybe Monday, I was at a three-hour meeting where Galway got its first county manager in nine years. The county manager in Galway has been acting but we have finally got a manager. We got a fantastic presentation from all the directors but I was struck by the variation. Some towns benefitted and some did not. I had a particular interest in Connemara and its absence from the presentations was notable. Look at Carraroe where raw sewage is pouring into the bay. Carraroe is in the heart of the Gaeltacht, i gcroílár na Gaeltachta. You cannot develop it without a sewerage facility. It has been on the cards for years but Uisce Éireann has it in the wrong place and it will not happen.

Then there is housing. There are some very good initiatives all over County Galway but let us look again at Connemara and Ceantar na nOileán. There are a number of places that are deserted and where the population is falling with no overall plan. The town and village renewal and all the other projects are brilliant ideas but who is rural proofing them? Who is seeing where they go? I do not believe that Carraroe, Carna or any of these towns in Connemara have ever benefitted from that scheme. I am only singling out some. The rural proofing is important as is balance.

Then there is the region. The Minister for Finance, or it might have been the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, I cannot remember which, took exception to this but in 2018 the European Commission downgraded the north-west region to a region in transition. In 2020 the European Parliament’s committee on regional development categorised it as a lagging region. I see huge potential in this but the implementation on the ground in a just, fair and sustainable way is the part that is very weak.

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