Is it any coincidence that the regions that fared badly in yesterday's incomes survey are those where infrastructure is poor, asks Tim O'Brien
The gap between the rich and the poor regions of the State is not getting wider; in fact it is getting slightly narrower, according to the County Income and Regional GDP Bulletin, released by the Central Statistics Office yesterday.
The CSO has compiled an index of the two regions by which it measures different speeds of development and economic prosperity.
Commenting on the disparity between the regions yesterday, the CSO said: "The gap of 13 points between the two regions represents a slight decrease on the gap of 13.7 points in 2000 and 14.5 points in 1999."
The years covered in the bulletin tie in with the first two years of the National Development Plan - 2000 and 2001 - and the figures would appear to give the lie to claims by the independent lobby in the west that the NDP is in fact widening the gap between the rich regions at the expense of poorer ones.
At first glance, however, the statistics appear to indicate otherwise: growth in Dublin, expressed as a percentage of the national total, fell from 38.6 per cent in 2000 to 37.9 per cent in 2001; and the percentages in the Border, midland and western (BMW) region rose from 19.2 per cent to 19.8 per cent.
But not even the CSO argued yesterday that this was the beginning of an equalisation between the rich and poorer regions.
To paraphrase campaigners for regional development in the west: statistics, like the scriptures, can be quoted by the devil.
Firstly, an examination of the scale of the sums involved reveals that output in Dublin actually grew, from more than €35 billion in 2000 to more than €39 billion in 2001, while the rise in the southern and eastern (S&E) region as a whole was more than €9 billion - or three times that of the BMW region.
In short, a hiccup in the dominant Dublin region can, when looked at statistically, indicate that the poorer regions are becoming powerhouses of the State.
In fairness, the poor and rich regions are no longer strictly the BMW and S&E respectively. The S&E region, for example, includes the comparatively poor south-east, while the BMW includes the comparatively prosperous Galway and Louth regions.
But you could track yesterday's figures for disposable income by the level of infrastructure available.
The cities and large towns served by good roads, ports, railways and airports are doing best - Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway - as well as Louth, which is on the Dublin-Belfast economic corridor. Those regions doing worst have a lower level of these services, lower access to high-speed technology communications, and, not surprisingly, lower disposable incomes.
If yesterday's figures confirm anything, it is this link between infrastructure and prosperity. This is not rocket science - rural Ireland has always known there are better-paid jobs in the cities.
The danger for the poorer regions lies in the lack of action on the part of the Government to prioritise infrastructure in these areas. Faced with delays to the roads building programme, the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, has directed that priority be given to building motorways to the cities of Galway and Limerick, two regions already doing well.
It is not that these should not be fast-tracked but that their high priority will, the roads authority has admitted, push roads to Waterford, Sligo, Kerry and other deprived regions further down the list. This can only widen the regional prosperity gap.