The Government has had 5½ years of the NDP to deliver for Donegal, but it has failed there and throughout the BMW region, writes Marian Harkin
It is ironic that at a time when the Government has announced its intention to begin discussion on the next National Development Plan (2007-14), such potent evidence of failure to deliver on the core commitment in the 2000-06 plan, ie to balance regional development, has emerged in Co Donegal.
This week, 560 job losses were announced at Hospira in Donegal town and the people of Co Donegal were confirmed in a report by the Combat Poverty Agency as being most at risk of poverty.The Government has had 5½ years of the current plan to deliver for Co Donegal. It has failed there and throughout the Border, Midlands and West region (BMW). It is significant that the three counties most at risk of poverty - Donegal, Mayo and Leitrim - are in the BMW region. This is not surprising, bearing in mind the complete lack of balance in the delivery of investment under the NDP.
Some simple figures illustrate the gap between NDP objectives and their delivery, and this is particularly obvious in the EU Cohesion Fund spend. Since 2000, just 14 per cent of cohesion funding, or approximately €114 million, was spent in the BMW region, while 79 per cent, or approximately €630 million, was spent in the South and East region, with 7 per cent spent nationally to the benefit of both regions.
The seriousness of this underspend and the cynicism involved is breathtaking, because it was Government use of the statistics of the BMW region which enabled the whole of the State to benefit from the EU Cohesion Fund.
However, instead of implementing the fund to create cohesion between regions, it has been used to further enhance the competitiveness of the South and East region while further depressing that of the BMW region.
In the NDP, not one objective set down in the roads programme will be achieved by the end of 2006. Hopelessly-inept control of contracts in the first three years has seen €7 billion of budgeted expenditure on roads escalate to more than €15 billion. This horrendous excess in spending has been compounded by where the money has actually been spent.
In the region most in need - the BMW - the expenditure at the end of 2004 was running at 69 per cent of forecast spending, while in the South and East region the spending was at 144 per cent of the amount forecast.
The infrastructural deficiencies which have resulted from these policies are reflected in the job-creation statistics. Between 1997 and 2004, there has been a reduction of approximately 2,000 full-time jobs in IDA-assisted companies in the BMW region. In contrast, there has been an increase of approximately 22,000 jobs in similar companies in the South and East region. The physical infrastructure deficiency of the BMW is matched by its resources deficit in third-level education. The South and East has six universities and eight institutes of technology, while the BMW has just one university and six institutes of technology. Bearing in mind this imbalance, it was infuriating to see the recent OECD recommendations that investment in research be confined to universities, and that institutes of technology should be confined to their original narrow function of the 1970s.
The surest indicator that the Government has no intention at this time of delivering balanced regional development is reflected in the figures for research and development investment in the State's two regions. Provisional figures across the business, higher education and Government sectors indicate that investment in R&D in the South and East region for 2002 exceeded €1,200 million, while in the BMW region it was approximately €200 million - 14 per cent of the spend for 27 per cent of the population. This pattern of investment in R&D was repeated in 2003.
The R&D required to meet the EU's objectives under the Lisbon agenda, which aims to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world, is occurring in the South and East region but not in the BMW region.Despite having been advised to front-load NDP investment in the areas most in need, the opposite has occurred, with a consequent continuing widening of the economic gap between Ireland's two regions. If this situation is to change a ring-fenced 10-year envelope of investment must be committed to the BMW region.
Marian Harkin is an Independent TD for Sligo-Leitrim and an MEP for Ireland North West