Joe Conway (Independent)

Cuirim fíorfháilte roimh an Aire, atá anseo anocht i measc na hoibre tábhachtaí atá idir lámha aige i láthair na huaire agus a bheidh ag dul ar aghaidh sa todhchaí. Gabhaim míle buíochas leis as sin. Balanced regional development is akin to what I think is virtue. We all claim to aspire to it but what results is often a sullied product born of self-interest and displaying little that is manifestly virtuous. It is an inescapable truth that all countries are the jealous possessors of a piece of national confectionery known as the national cake. This can, depending on the exigencies of the moment, shrink or grow but it serves little purpose if it is not shared out. As the immortal Bard once wrote, "Ay, there's the rub".

When the first sector is cut from the cake it has an immutable effect on the remainder, as do all successive cuts. In the national sense, if those who wield the baker's blade fail to ensure a fair cut, it results in disaffection, with regional and economic retardation in many sections of the State. There are many factors that affect the apportionment of funds for regional development, such as population, social disadvantage, unemployment, investment, location, and historical issues to name but a small few. There is an immutable law, as I see it, however, that underpins regional development and investment. As the cake is for division, if you level up in one area it is almost inevitable that you are going to have to level down somewhere else.

I am going to digress here just for a moment. We all remember the chaotic times when Boris was Prime Minister and he spoke of one of his favourite projects, which was levelling up. From those chaotic days of Boris's premiership it was such a Holy Grail for the Tory Ministers at the time that they were tripping over the slats, trying to claim ownership of the term "levelling up". One Minister, Justine Greening, nearly came to blows with Boris because she claimed authorship of the phrase back in 2014. Anyway, by the time the general election came last year about 10% for the money set aside for levelling up was used for so-called levelling up. Levelling up or, more correctly, compensatory regional development is a hard act to do well, if at all.Coming from the south east, it would be easy to get sucked into a non-productive whinge-fest about regional planning as it pertains in that area. I could instance the fact that the entire south east has had fewer IDA visits than the whole of County Clare. I could itemise, if I were bad-minded enough, the abysmal failure to invest in connectivity in the south east, for example, the N25 - there was a mass meeting last night about the Euroroute - a single carriageway road with a 400% traffic increase, the N24 blackballed again from funding a couple of months ago into what seems like an endless limbo, a train service from Waterford to the capital that takes ages because that express train has to chug into Kilkenny and reverse back out again, and an airport that needs a paltry Government grant, something in the area of €12 million or €15 million, to lengthen and widen the runway. The Minister spoke about connectivity and the regional airports. The people of Waterford and the surrounding counties are there now with their noses to the window looking in from the frost at the cosy room where, inside, Daidí na Nollag Micheál is disbursing €200 million to Cork. I could, if I were a real malcontent, talk about our technological university, SETU, which of the five technological universities gets what the Minister's fellow countryman, the late great John Healy, used to call in The Irish Timesthe hind tit funding. It gets the least of all the five technological universities, even though all four others have full universities located there. I will draw this minor complaint to an end now. If life and love and the love of life mattered at all to me, I could remind the House of our university hospital that had to fight tooth and nail to get a cath lab open at weekends. The black humour of the Déise said you must not have a coronary in Waterford at the weekend because, if you do, you are heading for bealach na nDéise.

Why are these inhibitors and many more in existence? As I said, I will not traumatise the Minister's evening with any Déise whinge-fest but why do these situations prevail? I will give the House a little hint. The last two major infrastructural developments in Waterford were, in 2004, the suspension toll bridge, the great second river crossing, and in 2006, when the M9 was extended to Waterford. Who do you think was the Minister for transport at the time? It was none other than the much-loved Martin Cullen, a Fianna Fáil Minister for transport from the Déise. Since then, nada. Balanced regional development is often now predicated in this type of balance. It is balanced in relation to the number of Ministers you can balance in or around your constituency. Most of those in this House are far too young to remember the seemingly endless conflict that carried on between Prime Minster Thatcher and the unions between 1979 and 1990. One of her doughty adversaries at the time was a man called Sidney Weighell. He was the general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen in the UK. He also played football with great aplomb for Newcastle, Sunderland and Sheffield United. When we was asked about the philosophy that underpinned free collective bargaining, he said, mangling his metaphors in his usual direct Yorkshire way, that free collective bargaining followed the dictates of the pig trough in that those with the biggest snouts get the lion's share of the swill. I fear balanced regional development has to find an antidote to this type of politics and clientelism that thrives on the big snout syndrome. Unless and until we devise a formula for muzzling those gigantic snouts we will continue to have dysfunction and consequent disaffection throughout the land because the regional planning schema will be still unfit for purpose. The answers are obvious but they are not easy.