Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Former Deputies John Deasy, Paudie Coffey, Pat Deering, Phil Hogan, Liam Twomey and Michael D'Arcy and Deputies Paul Kehoe and John Paul Phelan all are or have been Fine Gael TDs from the south east. All have either fallen or are on the precipice. Fine Gael, remarkably, won 50% of the 14 seats in the 2011 general election in the south east of Ireland. Once this Dáil has been dissolved, all these people will have left national politics. It is an incredible reflection, actually an indictment, of Fine Gael's decade in power that these candidates either were not returned or chose not to face the electorate. The south east is not remarkable. The north west and the midlands are also walking away from the traditional parties of government. People are basically being forced to seek out new homes because of their political anger.

The Minister will be familiar with the movie, "The Hunger Games", a possible characterisation of Boris Johnson's levelling-up strategy. An insanely out of touch capital acts as a parasite on the rest of the country. Provinces are divided and conquered. When you look at what is getting done in the national development plan, it is somewhat instructive. This year, we will spend €13 billion on publicly funded capital projects and it is projected that by the end of this decade, we will have spent €165 billion. The south east has 8.9% of the population but in the past decade has received less than 1% of all major capital spending. The region has turned away from Fine Gael because the educated view is that Fine Gael is not living up to its promises. According to the first iteration of the Department of public expenditure's capital tracker, Dublin, with 29% of the population, is drinking in 65% of the spending on major projects. In the second iteration it was 56%. For all the talk about spending codes and business plans, when big projects hit Cabinet, it is to Dublin and Cork they go and the rest of the country can wait. All of this is before the absolutely ludicrous price tag of metro north or the finalisation of the children's hospital bill. As a country, we apparently just have to close our eyes and cough up billions. In 2011, Fine Gael's promise to deliver a full national university to Waterford, similar to Maynooth or UL, was erased, with WIT left to starve for a decade and then forced into a complicated and underfunded merger. The new technological university, TU, has no new courses, no new academic disciplines, no ability to borrow and no capital projects awarded. Every TU is now contracting against a growing university sector. What happened to Fine Gael's promises to the south east? In 2013, it similarly promised that being part of the Cork-led buyer hospital grouping would not be to the disadvantage of University Hospital Waterford.

This has resulted in that hospital getting fewer resources than every other model 4 hospital in the country. Can the Minister tell me what the new messages from Fine Gael to the people of Waterford and the south east are and why anyone should believe them?

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