Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I love my home town of Drogheda. Our small city is really in my DNA and defines me. We have had and still have our problems. Every place does. We always overcome them. We often do so in spite of and not because of Government support. Increasingly, we have had to rely on ourselves to address the problems this Government patently ignores. To give an example, to tackle the social and economic problems that formed the backdrop to a vicious criminal feud, it was me as an Opposition Senator and my colleague, Councillor Pio Smith, who went to the then Department of Justice and Equality to make the case for the Drogheda implementation board model to be adopted. The local business community felt ignored by both central and local government. I helped to set up the Love Drogheda BID scheme, which is helping to breathe new life into our town. It is what responsible public representatives do.

Our town, as the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, will know, is the largest in Ireland. It straddles two local authority areas. We are a city in all but name, yet last week, a Fianna Fáil Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, again rejected out of hand my long-standing call for city status for Drogheda. A Labour Party Bill approved by the Dáil seven years ago, which would see councils like Drogheda borough council restored, continues to be blocked. When Deputy Simon Coveney relegated Drogheda to the third division status of tiny towns like Listowel under the discredited national planning framework, we had to mount a campaign to upgrade our status to development centre, but few real economic and foreign direct investment job benefits have actually accrued from that. That was tokenism at its worst, to save face for Fine Gael. Fine Gael also bottled, in the guise of the then Minister, Deputy Coveney, the boundary review I commissioned in 2015. Logic said it should have seen the urban area of Drogheda in County Meath included in Drogheda proper.

In recent weeks, as the Minister of State and every Member of this House will know, the D Hotel, Drogheda's only large-scale downtown hotel, has been taken out of commission for tourism use, unravelling the work of public representatives like my colleague, Councillor Michelle Hall, Louth County Council, and indeed Fáilte Ireland, which worked hard to promote Drogheda as what is known as a destination town.

These are not nakedly political jibes or charges I make here in the House this evening: these are the objective facts. It is no wonder that the term "official neglect" is one the people of my proud small city are now using when they speak of this Government. The people of Drogheda feel like they are being trolled or gaslighted by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. I do not say that lightly.

I have given the Minister of State the evidence, and here is more. The most visible form of neglect is official vandalism. We have more than 40 derelict properties lying idle, crumbling in parts of our historic town centre. Every year on Committee Stage of the Finance Bill I propose that the Bill would be amended to include Drogheda in the living city renovation initiative. Every year, my amendment is rejected, first by a Fine Gael Minister and now by a Fianna Fáil Minister. Last week, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael McGrath, again refused to entertain my proposal in a reply to a parliamentary question.

This targeted tax break has helped countless owner-occupiers and developers across the country to bring many vacant and derelict properties back into use. I will give an example. In Kilkenny, 19 properties have been brought back into use. That is half the number of derelict properties contained in Drogheda's town centre. I wish good luck and more power to Kilkenny, but as the Minister of State knows, Drogheda is twice the size of Kilkenny and it is just as historic and architecturally important. I appeal to the Minister of State, and to his senior colleague, the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, to look again at Drogheda and to help us in the same way as the likes of Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny have been helped and allow us have access to the living city scheme to help tackle our dereliction and vacancy crisis.

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