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!

Our jobs and retail conundrum.

"Scoop" - a very good digger.

I like to think that I am a good “digger”, not may I add in the garden, as most things I plant unfortunately die. The green fingers in the Garland Clan definitely belong to the fairer sex – I could not even grow my GIY garlic!

What I mean is that when I wish to write about a particular topic I do my very best to dig out some research or at the very least I look for some statistical information that will help get my writing juices flowing. This in turn allows me the time to bash away on my keyboard, time and time again, so that I now really enjoy expressing my views and opinions though the medium of print.

I regularly use a number of reference sites, on the old Interweb, and the Central Statistic Office (CSO) site was used to last week garner some interesting statistics about the regional variations in a measure called Gross Added Value (GAV). This measures “the difference between production value and intermediate consumption and represents the value added by the firm.” This is a great site for statistics but I do feel that it is overly complicated to use and maybe this is deliberate so as to dissuade people from engaging.

This GAV figure is measured in Euro and the state’s average for 2012 (the last statistical data point) is €34,308, Dublin measured €51,839 and the South East came in at €23,588. Quite a significant variation then across the country, as you would expect. The South East’s high for GAV was back in 2007 when the figure was at €29,884, but this was still significantly below the state average for that year of €39,522.

This GAV figures reflects the low wages economies across the South East which should, in theory, make the SE a more competitive inward investment option.

However, a multi-national will not invest into a region based on low wages alone, it may need a specific skill set or a multi-faceted spread of skills that will ultimately help generate profit to offset what would be a multimillion Euro investment. The stakes are very high!

The low GAV also backs up the statistics that show, right across the SE, there is significantly lower disposable income for our very localised economy. After all if you have only €50 to spend at the end of the week you will spend €50 and if you have €300 the difference this makes is to our economy is considerable. This much lower disposable income directly influences the retailing opportunities in our City Centre and across the whole SE region.

Our current conundrum is this.

To get a better retail mix and a better retail branding in the City we need to see more money being spent in our local economy. But we cannot increase this spend until such times as we attract better higher paid jobs. But attracting those better higher paid jobs will affect our GAV and possibly makes us even more unattractive to future investment.

It actually is a very difficult set of balls to be juggling.

But the balls have been juggled now for many, many years and yet we appear to be no further forward in actually making Waterford and the SE an important place for increased FDI and other indigenous investment streams.

We can only improve the Status Quo by radically looking at just how attractive we are for investment, because the route we have currently chosen is clearly not working. The City, County and Region need to look for far-reaching solutions that will make the SE THE most attractive place to invest.

 

We need to be better than every other region full stop!

Perhaps one quick immediate solution is to stop looking at commercial rates as a simple cash cow and start actually incentivising investment through a lower rate structure and essentially reducing the cost of being in business in Waterford.

If we do this the future statistics will show that in 2016 was in fact a benchmark year, a year when we put Waterford back on the investment map. New foundations are needed so let us start building them now.