Done and dusted.

As Winterval comes to the end of its first week we can look forward to a busy Christmas and hopefully the many businesses in and around the City Centre will see a much needed boost in sales that will carry them through into 2016. In 2016 all we can hope for as a Christmas present is a much bigger slice of the recovery cake and that all the headline promises we have read and heard about in our local media will be delivered by those making the promises.

Remember, it is very dangerous to over promise!

Waterford’s Four are now in election mode and are willing to promise delivery on projects that in truth should have been delivered months and years ago. No doubt over the next few weeks and months we will be endlessly bombarded with just how lucky we have been in terms of investment. So we really must ask ourselves if what has come our way is good enough or can be accepted as the absolute minimum that was needed to be delivered over the lifetime of the last Government. I would advocate that Government has under delivered for Waterford.

The simple fact is that more should have come Waterford’s way over the last number of years and we must all understand that any investment, that has managed to travel down the M9 from Dublin, has not been nearly enough and, yes, we may well sit at the top table but we are still feeding off the crumbs thrown to us and we have still not been invited to choose from the menu.

At the last Waterford Council plenary meeting, held in Dungarvan, the Council passed the Waterford City Centre Urban Renewal Scheme. A Scheme that will see circa €4,000,000 come from Government and circa €4,000,000 come from Waterford Council. Why ALL the money for the Scheme cannot come from Government I do not know!

The final meaty document contains all the plans, altered plans and reference to the 76 submissions from organisations, groups, individuals, businesses and Councillors – well 4 Councillors to be very precise.

Councillors Mulligan, Kelly, O’Neill and Daniels appear to be the only four Councillors out of our 32 good men and women of the Council, who seem to have been bothered to lodge a written submission. I will hazard a guess that many more will claim a significant input, behind closed doors, in committee, to this development document – but it would have been fitting for us, members of the public, to be able to actually read and dissect our Councillors input and observations, so that we can judge for ourselves the level of that input.

The final document is now done and dusted and all indications are that the work will start early in 2016 with the promise that no work on reducing car parking spaces will commence until the gas works car park is delivered – first muted for completion some 4 or 5 years ago!

During last week’s Metropolitan Council meeting we heard that the demolition for the North Quay was also done and dusted (again) and the work would start in the New Year. However, not many people will realise that we are to be left with piles of “concrete road foundation stones” of around 5cm square.

Swindon's Magic Roundabout

This substrate will be left on the North Quay until such times as it can be used.

The debacle that was the broadcast centre roundabout is now done and dusted. People power made all the difference and I have no doubt that this engineering master class has seen the Council receive the most amounts of complaints since records began.

It just goes to show that when we all work together mountains can be moved. Unfortunately, social media was almost instantaneously awash with Councillors claiming individual credit for what really should have been acknowledged as a remarkable team effort to turn around an experiment that a five year old Lego user could see would not work.

An attack on our Liberté.

I prepare to write this blog based on my experiences of the previous week and around events and meetings that I may have attended, which I feel the readers would be interested to read my commentary on. My blog is also a reflection of my weekly article in one of Waterford City's local newspapers. 

So, last week I was going to write and express my views on my attendance at the recent plenary session of Waterford Council, in Dungarvan, and, of course, the debacle that was the Broadcast Centre roundabout on the ring road, which on Friday afternoon was miraculously reduced to one lane at the apparent insistence of the National Roads Authority, as part of some “continental style” traffic management experiment.

However, as I watched the Bosnia and Herzegovina versus Ireland qualifier, on a foggy night in Zenica, social media started to light up and flash reports of gun attacks and bombings taking place across the whole of Paris.

As the news started to filter through it became very apparent that Paris was once again under attack and, for the second time in 2015, there was a Multi Pronged Terrorist Attack (MPTA) taking place across the capital city of France. No one could have imagined that only ten months on from the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks that we would once again be revisiting all the horrors associated with a coordinated and heinous attack on the City, the nation and the people that live by the motto “Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité”.

By now there have been thousands of words written about last Friday’s MPTA and perhaps more worryingly for all of us is that this latest attack was not aimed at one organisation but unmistakably targeted a nation and its people. Worryingly, this latest attack targeted more than just the French nation as it also targeted Germany and the USA. The German football team were playing in the Stade de France and a US band was playing in the Bataclan Theatre, and if it was not for an observant security guard a suicide bomber would have accessed fans in the Stade de France!

We are now beginning to see a new type of terrorism that can coordinate and operate multiple near-simultaneous bombings and shootings and questions have to be asked if our Western security forces can cope with and prevent such coordinated attacks in the future. I fear that the determined terrorists we are now facing will always manage to evade security forces, as these can never be 100% secure, and inflict their own perverted style of justice on our Western world.

The future of free border access across Europe, which were created in 1985 with The Schengen Agreement, must now to be reviewed as evidence emerges on how the terrorists were able to travel freely crossing borders in cars weighed down with weapons, bombs and ammunition.

If we are to protect the very freedoms that allow us to write commentary in the printed media, post opposing observations on social media and permit us the opportunity air our own views, and argue these robustly in public, then we must be prepared to protect these fundamental rights.

Friday 13^th November will change Europe forever and, unlike the events in Paris of 7^th January, last Friday’s events will alter our views and our perception of just how safe our society is. As European nations begin to pick through the evidence that will eventually trace the origins of this monstrous attack, we must hope and trust that a global solution will now be found and implemented.

ISIS is a growing threat to the very way we lead our lives and we have to find a consistent solution that protects us in our own free society. We cannot allow terrorist organisations to dictate our liberty just because they fundamentally disagree with our way of living. We must jealously protect those freedoms and perhaps, just perhaps, we need drop our PC mumbo jumbo rhetoric and start some straight talking as how to best look after OUR hard fought societal freedoms.

It is Budget time once again!

The 2015/2016 national budget is now behind us and we are just awaiting some last minute discussions in the Dáil, some machinations in the Seanad, and then the final approval of the Finance Bill, traditionally, sometime in February and then it will be all over for another year and it could well be the last budget delivered by the FG/Labour coalition as we move inextricably towards the promised “E-A-R-L-Y” spring election. Before we know it, it will be 2016 and we will all have forgotten about Mr Noonan’s last budget.

However, for us in Waterford, there is another budget looming on the horizon – the Waterford City and County Council budget.

As the Council begin to mull over their financial figures and projections for 2016, we are once again nearer the time for our Council Executive and our Council Representatives to vote on the 2016 budget, which will be somewhere around the €132,000,000 mark! It is a time for us to see how our representatives perform in what is seen by many as their most fundamental task.

Will the proposed budget be passed? Will we see pact voting? Will we see strategic voting? Will we see a genuine forensics analysis of the budget figures?

This is the time of year when our public representatives earn their corn and it really is a time of year when we hope that they will look at the bigger picture, rather than a parochial view of their own wards, and make the right decisions that will drive economic investment back into the City Centre and further afield across the whole County. Failure to understand the economics of making sound budgetary decisions will have a profound effect on how we perform as a City and County in 2016.

This budget sets out the Council’s spending plans for 2016 and also sets income targets on big ticket items such as the Commercial Rates collection which in the last budget was circa €32,000,000, it sets the household charges, car parking charges and all the other associated cost centres that will allow the Council to operate for the next 12 months. We will also see spending plans outlined and discussed such as the delivery of the Waterford City Centre Urban Renewal Plans, festival spending budgets, roads maintenance plans, housing spending and much, much more besides.

The headline figures for businesses will, of course, be the Commercial Rates collection amounts and whether or not these will remain the same, increase or ideally, for businesses to invest, these should be reduced by up to 20%. A rates reduction will encourage investment, will increase employment and will make for a better City Centre.

Alas, I feel that these will remain the same as the last two years and yet the brave decision has to be the introduction of a significant reduction to help struggling City Centre businesses. Any offset in the reduction of rates will be collected with new businesses starting up and a significant rates reduction will go some way to encouraging the retail brands the City is currently missing to invest in Waterford. In addition a better retail mix will drive increased footfall and this in turn will also encourage more business start-ups and these new businesses will pay their share in commercial rates. Win Win!

Another brave decision would be the reduction in car parking charges and, if the Council take the lead in this process, then the private owners have to follow suits. This is still the elephant in the room and until we tackle this issue we will find it increasingly difficult to encourage the people on the “Dunmore Road” into the City Centre never mind further afield.

I still wonder if, due to their free car parking passes, our representatives see the car parking as an issue or perhaps they drive around wearing rose tinted glasses.

After all, if it costs you nothing, zero, nada, nil to park your car in Waterford City and County why would there be a problem?

Tourism – the biggest industry in the World!

Tell me what you really think.

Those readers who know me will know that over the last twelve months I have literally come out of the closest in my Lycra and can officially be described as a MAMIL (middle aged man in Lycra). It is a hobby that has taken me all over the south east and further afield, around this island of green. In fact since I had to hung up my golf bats (due to old rugby injuries), cycling is a sport I have taken to my heart over the last 15 months and I am now just a few of kilometres short of cycling 10,000km. I, like most of today’s cyclists have an App, as there is an App for everything, and this App also show that I have climbed nearly 62,000m in those 15 months - hard to comprehend just how high that is.

Who needs the Tour de France when we have so much available to us on our doorstep here in Waterford.

The unseasonably good weather has allowed me to continue to cycle in my Lycra shorts over the last couple of weekends and last Saturday and Sunday was no different. So mild was the weather that I even managed to see a few butterflies out and about, and I also managed to be hit by several bumble bees, and being smacked on the face by a bumble bee at 30 plus kph stings like hell!

It has amazed me that as we head into the depths of winter our wonderful countryside and coastline are still accessible whether you are on a bike, in a car or simply just walking. Being able to see the vast array of autumnal colours that coat our countryside at this time of the year I can see why this is the favourite time for so many people. There were simply oodles of people out and about over the weekend and car parks that access our stunning coves and beeches, whilst not heaving, were very busy with families taking the opportunity to enjoy the extremely mild weather and get one or two last autumnal walks in, with the dog, before the winter weather finally decides to arrive.

The more I cycle around Waterford and the south east, the more I come to appreciated exactly what we have on our doorstep and I do often wonder if we are really utilising this natural beauty for the benefit of ourselves and as a potential tourism income generator.

We all know that Ireland’s Ancient East has been designed as a tourism driver in an attempt to balance the tens of millions being spent on dragging millions of tourist “out west” to the Wild Atlantic Way. Yet we read recently that funding for this project across Waterford and the south east has not been forthcoming and we must ask why? I would also hazard a guess that many readers will not be aware that the Ireland’s Ancient East project is now over two years old and we are yet to see any real economic benefits from this new branding.

 

In my 10,000km of cycling around the south east I have yet to see one sign proclaiming that you are in Ireland’s Ancient East and I am yet to see any real signs of branding that will encourage our tourists to spend their Euro in Waterford and this region. I fear that we are yet again being dreadfully acceptant that what has been delivered to date is satisfactory and adequate to compete with other tourism offerings.

We have accessible scenery that rivals the very best in Ireland and we have a tourism offering that certainly competes with some of the more established brands in Ireland and yet we seem to be, once again, the poorer cousin when it comes to funding and shouting about just what we have to offer.

More must be done for Waterford and the south east as after all tourism is the biggest industry in the World!