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Development hyprocrisy !
‘THE growing incoherence of our political system’ was how former Taoiseach Dr. Garret Fitzgerald almost four years ago described the hastily thought up decentralisation plan cooked up by then Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy for his Budget 2004 and which another commentator found to be ‘totally cynical.’
This decentralisation plan, should details now be forgotten, proposed moving 10,300 civil servants to 53 locations in 25 counties but despite the government wasting around §1 billion in new offices for these relocated mandarins, hardly any have moved and, most likely, about 90 per cent never will do so. No wonder, then, that the National Spatial Strategy of 2002 which also paid lip service to regional development, was seen as equally hypocritical and, for example, was described by The Irish Times as ‘incoherent’.
Little wonder also that a welter of criticism has descended on the government for its two-faced stand on the hugely divisive situation that has developed over the Shannon furore in which Aer Lingus proposes dumping that airport, in preference to Belfast, for its Heathrow service and which has Fianna Fail ministers scurrying for cover in all directions. The Opposition parties are mostly confined to sitting on the fence or proffering holiday excuses, which opting-out also applied to Taoiseach Ahern until he finally used Education Minister Hanafin as a mouthpiece.
What an education minister has to do with economic development is hard to fathom and particularly since, as the Leaving Cert results highlighted, she has a hard job covering up the many failures of the educational system as a whole. While it may be politic to hide behind the constitutional protection of cabinet confidentiality, the government, as Article 28.4.2 of the Constitution states, ‘shall be collectively responsible for the Departments of State’ and ultimately, somebody must come out from behind the fence, whether it be An Taoiseach or whoever else.
Governments cannot have it both ways where regional development is concerned. The Western and other underdeveloped regions, as also, for example, the South West, do need what was once described as ‘positive discrimination’ and this is not done by publishing hypocritical and image-building documents like the Spatial Strategy and decentralisation plan and then consigning them to the rubbish bin.
Local government is treated in the same disgraceful way and while Minister Gormley, for example, currently sabre-rattles about the Nitratre Directive, county councils all over the country fail to advance badly needed sewage schemes. Most towns everywhere dump their sewage into local rivers and streams and, thus ,‘local government’, en bloc, is, arguably, the biggest polluter in Ireland. Witness the Galway crisis and who knows but that next it’s the ‘lovely’ Lakes of Killarney !
Transport, as mentioned recently, also needs a coordinated policy and if that applies to road and rail, the same approach is needed with air services. Ireland is different to most other European countries in that it is an island nation, obviously more dependent on air services, while internally, this country has the highest density of roads and the lowest population density. These facts, historically, have placed a huge burden on transport policy and necessitated heavy subsidisation for underdeveloped regions but, again, the road networks in peripheral regions such as West Cork and South Kerry are very sub-standard.
If these problems, which seriously inhibit development in such regions, receive no more than endless lip service, it is hardly surprising that, where air transport is concerned, the same undisciplined two-faced attitudes prevail and now where Shannon is concerned, the lame-duck politicos in government are ‘hoist on their own petard’ and try to escape, as one commentator described it, by ‘perfecting the art of acting as the Opposition to itself.’
The levels of hyprocrisy, as Fintan O’Toole put it, are indeed ‘stratospheric’ but perhaps it is more than overdue that the long-standing so-called ‘commitment’ to regional development should be exposed for the farce it has always been and, equally, that local government powerlessness should be recognised as the ‘drag’ it constitutes on economic and community progress in every town and village.