Frank Feighan (Fine Gael)

I was elected to Roscommon County Council in 1999 from the town of Boyle. There are many towns like Boyle all around the country. It is not a county town or even a major town. However, it is a town with a proud past. It was a market town with many shops and businesses, some of which had been there for three generations. However, in the past 20 years a huge shift has taken place and the survival of towns such as Boyle has been challenged.

Boyle was not large enough to attract major firms such as Dunnes, Penneys and Tesco. The retail business has moved to the major towns and unfortunately we cannot attract young business people to take over the older businesses. Like many other towns, it did not have a major hospital. It had no Government Department and no county council. Most county towns have an office of the county council providing at least 200 or 300 jobs. Eircom, or Telecom Éireann, as it was called, and the ESB were not represented, so there were no safe jobs. It had no Government decentralisation. Boyle and towns like it carried on primarily because of the people who lived in them and the businesses run by them.

When the Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, announced nearly four years ago that 10,000 jobs would be moved to areas which had not already benefited from decentralisation, I was very excited, as were most of the councillors in my county. We drew up a submission which showed that County Roscommon had a low crime rate, affordable housing and access from Boyle to Castlereagh to Ballaghaderreen to Roscommon town. If 200 jobs came to Roscommon town – if the Government took a visionary attitude and decided to relocate a full Department to a town such as this – there could be a cluster effect. Senator Daly agrees with me, because he came up with the same idea. For example, if the Department of Agriculture and Food could relocate, lock, stock and barrel, to an agricultural county such as Roscommon, 500 or 600 jobs would be created – perhaps 200 in Roscommon town, 100 in Castlereagh, 100 in Ballaghaderreen and 100 in Boyle. Staff could live wherever they wanted in the county and if they were promoted they would not have to move back to Dublin but could move within the county. That would be a major attraction for County Roscommon and many other counties.