The prioritisation of the Border Midlands West (BMW) region in the National Development Plan has put the southeast at a serious disadvantage, according to a major report by SIPTU. The region incorporates the counties of Waterford, Wicklow, Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny.
The report, due to be submitted to the Southern and Eastern Regional Assembly on Thursday, describes the south-east as "a makey-up region, a conglomeration of what was left over after political lobbying defined the shape of the BMW region."
The SIPTU regional secretary, Mr Mike Jennings, said yesterday: "Not surprisingly, for an entity created from such a process it resembles more a camel than an antelope. No one could have been unaware of the huge disparities of need and disadvantage existing in this region. Our only aim has been to highlight them."
Some of the findings of the SIPTU report are: Economic output per capita is 84.1 per cent of the national average, and income per capita is 87.4 per cent of the national average. The region has a low take-up of third-level education, low research and development investment, a poorly developed services sector and a high dependency on agriculture.
Unemployment is 6.7 per cent, or over 20 per cent above the national average. It also has "a mismatch generally between the skills of those who are most likely to lose jobs in the current economic transition and the demands of the `new' type jobs replacing them . . . in the services or in the computer and information technology areas". Retraining is seen as a priority.
In Wexford unemployment has increased in recent months, and the closure of firms in New Ross means it is now a commuter town for Waterford. There has been a 50 per cent increase in single-parent families in Wexford since 1995, compared with a national increase of 37 per cent, and 26 per cent of workers are in semiskilled or unskilled occupations, compared with 8.5 per cent nationally.
Waterford has suffered 12,000 job losses in the past 14 months, many of them in traditional manufacturing. There are also fewer people in commercial services than in Dublin, Cork, Limerick or Galway. Beef-processing, a major employer, has also had layoffs because of the BSE crisis.