Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Frank McDonald, writing in The Irish Times, recently outlined the continuing dominance of spending and resource concentration in Dublin and its surrounds, to the detriment of the other regions. The article states: "We are sleepwalking our way towards a deeply dysfunctional, inequitable and unbalanced Ireland." The allocation of capital resources to Waterford is a clear reflection of that image. The endemic failure to resource Waterford as the regional driver for the south east is all too easily illustrated. For example, despite the hype relating to the university, no new visible investment in teaching buildings in Waterford has taken place in the past 20 years. The vaunted purchase of the Waterford Crystal site and the promised engineering building remain purely aspirational. The primary routes from Waterford to Cork and Limerick have remained devoid of upgrade for more than two decades. In the period 2019 to 2021, IDA Ireland site visits for the entire country totalled 558. Waterford was the subject of just 6% of those visits. In fact, just 30% of the visits were directed to Cork, Limerick and Galway. In two years, GDP in the south east has fallen by 20% while the economic juggernaut that is Dublin rolls on.

Surpassing this, it is in acute healthcare that discrimination in capital resourcing is most evident and egregious, as is the political gaslighting that comes with it. Replies to recent parliamentary questions I tabled outline that from 2013 to today, capital allocations to University Hospital Waterford, UHW, were just 45% of the budgets given to its peer regional hospitals in Limerick, Cork and Galway. That figure includes the Dunmore wing, the palliative ward and the new cath lab so often referenced by the Government in the House. Despite the continuous underfunding and having the lowest employee headcount of its peers, UHW still outperforms all others, even with the surge of patients from Wexford redirected there. Officially, its emergency department has been the busiest in the State since March and it continues to be an exemplar in emergency care key performance indicators,.

Knowing this, why did the Government see fit to award between €54 million and €94 million each to the other eight model 4 regional hospitals in the HSE's 2023 capital development plan while completely excluding UHW from accessing one red cent of funding from the national acute spending programme? Could it be because Waterford lacks the Cabinet seat required to drive investment along the VIP lane reserved for Minsters' pet projects? If that is not the case, understanding that there have been ten years of discriminatory spending injustice, as I have laid out and as evidenced by replies to parliamentary questions and the research of Frank McDonald and many economists, can the Taoiseach outline why the Government's spending decisions for Waterford are always wrong while those for him and his Cabinet colleagues are always right?

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