Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

People in Waterford and the south east know that the Taoiseach and the Government have forgotten them. In the election of 2011, 2016 and 2020, voters from across the south east who had been left to stew in their anger turned away from the traditional parties of government. Parliamentary responses I copied to the Taoiseach's office in recent weeks show that University Hospital Waterford, the south-east regional model 4 hospital, received just €83 million capital investment in the past ten years.

By contrast, in the same decade, the Government awarded €227 million on average to the comparator model 4 hospitals in Galway, Limerick and Cork. A sum of €87 million versus one of €227 million is evidence of pure discrimination against the south-east region.

During Leaders' Questions on 11 July last, the Taoiseach, in respect of University Hospital Waterford, stated: "under this Government €91 million has been invested in the hospital so far." Copies of parliamentary questions that I gave to the Taoiseach and each of his Ministers recently show that Waterford was awarded just €36.7 million in capital health funding by this Thirty-third Dáil, not €91 million the Taoiseach suggested. Again, this was but a fraction of the €130 million on average given to the other three hospitals I mentioned in that four-year period. The Taoiseach's statement to the House on 11 July was misleading and untrue. I therefore invite him to correct the record of the Dáil when he responds.

Given the evidence of ten years of discriminatory capital underinvestment in the hospital in Waterford, I ask whether the Taoiseach understands the right of people in the south east to be angry when they look at the current Dublin-Cork Cabinet? The evidence of shafting when it comes to investment extends beyond our hospital into the south east's aviation sector, its public transport and road development, its generation of foreign and direct investment generation and, most egregiously and especially, its higher education sector.

In the context of the South East Technological University, the Government has slow-walked a land purchase while providing no capital to carry out design work and nothing to fund construction of a new teaching building on this land site. This is despite its clear understanding that not a single new teaching building has been delivered on the campus in Waterford this millennium. The Waterford engineering building, first promised by the Taoiseach in 2011, was sideswiped by Government into a 2020 secondary phasing investment process. It is now just another broken promise to add to the many previous such promises. The three Government programmes between 2011 and 2020 singled out Waterford Institute of Technology for special attention. This is now manifested as a natty rebrand of the region in an underfunded merger. I know the Taoiseach is tired of me raising this issues. He will feel compelled to demonstrate that I am wrong by referencing other regional developments in order to prove that everything is okay. However, people in Waterford and the south east know that we are not getting our fair share. We are not fools and should not be taken as such.

The protests in respect of Irish Water were not properly understood by the Government of the day. They were never really about water. Rather, they were an expression of seething anger on the part of people who felt ignored, mistreated, let down and left behind. Despite his finely tuned political antenna, the Taoiseach does not seem to understand the building anger in the region, nor does the Government seem to be motivated to do anything to assuage it. In one of his first speeches on taking office, the Taoiseach promised that Waterford would not be forgotten. Ironically, however, that is precisely what the Government continues to do.

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