Is the excitement building?

The Waterford media was awash last week with various General Election candidates finally launching their campaigns, media profiles in our excellent local newspapers and of course the promise of some robust debating in a series of US styled pre-election public, or invitation only, debates.

Of course we will never really know what we are getting with the new untested candidates and all we can hope for is that their rhetoric will deliver in the Ronseal way – “It does exactly what it says on the tin.”

But I am not sure if these new candidates will ever get the chance to deliver on their promises as they will have an enormous, almost gargantuan, task of uprooting the existing established sitting TD’s.

It would appear that with the exception of maybe one TD change the people of Waterford may well have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. After all we are seeing, albeit exceedingly small, green shoots of recovery across the South East and this in turn can only benefit Waterford. 

When push comes to shove and you have a pencil in your hand, with the ballot paper in front of you, are you really going to vote for a political sea change that could in all likelihood make the hard earned Euro in your pocket worth less with the reckless tick of a ballot paper box?

Off and running.

I would hazard a guess that people will vote for some form of stability and a better the devil you know attitude. It may well materialise that we do not see wholesale changes in the political map and we will end up with many of the same faces returning to Dublin. Real political change takes an awful lot longer than the full term of a Government and new political parties take even longer to establish and gain suitable foundations to build an organisation that can challenge the norm.

Our “Frontier Ministers” have been recently waxing lyrically about Waterford’s strength as part of a growing SE economy and being at the very heart of a multi-campus “Technological University”, which now appears to be back on the radar just in time for GE16. I have no doubt that we will continue to hear about how working together is a sound economic plan for Waterford and the SE but in reality we are still very much a fractured region with very little in the way of a one direction plan.

Yes, working collectively as region is the only way forward but the half hearted efforts to date have seen the erosion of our hospital services, a nibbling away at our third level institution, boundary arguments that could have filled the plot of a wild west cowboy movie and the general lack of urgency on a gateway status have all hindered the delivery of a meaningful recovery across the SE.

In last week’s column I stated some statistics around the Gross Added Value (GAV) of jobs in the SE and the GAV figure is extraordinarily low and this must surely be of concern to all the registered voters in Waterford and across the whole of the SE.

If we cannot attract significant high end investment to Waterford at this moment in time when, as we are continually being told, we are an exceptional region for investment, then what will happen if we allow the continued erosion of our third level education establishment, the continued reduction in our hospital services and the public bickering on boundary issues.

We could and will continue to be a PR nightmare if these types of issues are not fixed with a cohesive and sustainable plan.

So, should we be excited about the upcoming GE16? Yes we should and we must do our bit to ask the hard questions and engage with the Politics, because that is just what we are not expected to do.

I guarantee that a few tough questions on the doorstep will either make or break any canvasser and it will probably be a surprise that you asked in the first place. Try it!