Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

I greatly appreciate being facilitated. I thank the Leader for accepting my proposal last week on the Order of Business for a debate on the BMW region. On that occasion I highlighted the very point made by Senator Daly, namely, that €640 million was unspent last year. Whoever is responsible for that has to accept blame for the discrepancy between development in the west under the BMW region and the rest of the country. In 2000, there was a gap of 13.7% between the BMW region and the rest of the country. Today the gap is 13%. Therefore, that is a minimal change, despite all we have heard from the Government side about the huge investment and so on. The return is an 0.7% GDP improvement in the status and that is not acceptable. There is no commitment and no prioritisation by Government towards spending and improving the level of infrastructure and economic development of the west if that is the reality.

It is frightening to note the report by a Teagasc official last week that by 2020, the flight from the land will be worse than it has ever been in our economic history. Some 25,000 to 35,000 additional people will have left rural Ireland, particularly in the BMW region. No Government policy is in place to stem that tide and there is no indication of such a policy. It is clear from the budgets of the past three years that there was no response to agriculture, our primary industry in the past. Senator MacSharry said our natural resources were being taken out of the region. If we are talking about developing the west, why is there not a commitment towards it?

When Deputy Brennan was Minister for Transport he had an opportunity to show his intention of balancing the economic infrastructure and the input of resources. He provided €300 million for a feasibility study on the provision of the western corridor rail link. Estimates show that €215 million would provide that rail link between Sligo and Limerick. At the same time he was providing €3 billion for the provision of a rail infrastructure in Dublin. We have yet to see whether or not that will happen. Can this be called prioritisation? Is this an adherence to the principles of Objective One status? It is not.

Senator Leyden referred to this Government looking for Objective One status. It was hauled reluctantly into making a decision. It waited two years before making a decision. The end of the Objective One status will come in 2006 and the west will not have benefited pro rata in terms of the rest of the country. The Minister of State should take note of the figure of 0.7%. This has been the rate of improvement over the past five years. There will be no better rate of improvement. This is the record and the indictment of this Government. Even the Western Development Commission was starved of resources and finances at a time when it was willing to put forward improvement projects.