“We loves an auld report, we do!”

It has to be said, that we here in Waterford just love to get or download one “Auld report” after another, telling us just what we already know!

The problem being, that those with parish pump vested interests in looking after their own constituents do not unfortunately, operate out of Waterford City and County. The power brokers, as we know, live somewhere else in this wee green island on the edge of Europe.

The Net result, is that Waterford has a veritable national library of reports, gathering dust in filing cabinets, desk drawers and being used as doorstops. I even saw one last week in a pub, stopping a table from wobbling (didn’t really, but you get my drift)!!!

The latest WIT South East Economic Monitor was published on 1^st July. This is an excellent wee snapshot, of just where Waterford fares in relation to our nearest and dearest neighbouring counties. The report manages to dumb down the myriad of statistics out there, into something that we should all be reading. This simplified version of just how slowly our recovery is crawling along, makes good reading – provided of course that you are interested in this sort of thing!

Here’s the crux of such reports. We should ALL be interested in their content and their findings. It is after all not rocket science. Every man and his dog knows that regional diversity and investment has failed. There is NO regional strategy that has worked to the benefit of Waterford and the greater South East region. Yes, every single successive Government has talked about “A regional economic policy”, supported by a report that states “This will work!” But time and time again we have witnessed abject failure when it comes to Ireland’s South East and North West, for that matter.

Minister Coveney’s “Ireland 2040 – Our Plan” (I’ve lost count which number this report actually is) promises to double the size of Waterford City in the next number of years. Just how will this be done if you look at where we are starting from in 2017? The WIT report shows the huge enormity of the task in hand. “Fact”, our economic foundations are, at best, built on a very, very unstable model. To make Waterford great once again, we will have to do something very radical, to get away from the low cost, low wage model that we now seem to have accepted as the norm.

We have known for years that the proportionate spending in the City and County is way below national averages. You only have to ask an honest retailer “How is business?” and they will tell you that it is “VERY TOUGH trading in Waterford and has been for the last number of years!” Yes, there may be signs of economic recovery, but they are miniscule shoots and hard to spot for many a business.

Unfortunately, many, as always, will interpret the tough trading conditions in a completely different way. Come Waterford Council’s 2018 budget deliberations, just how many of our 32 Councillors will be advocating a Commercial Rates increase? I guarantee you that the CEO’s budget will be looking for a 2, 3, 4 or 5% increase on business rates. Just where will this additional money come from, when ALL the recent reports clearly show that it is just NOT there, to take out of our exceedingly fragile economy?

If you look hard enough there is good news tucked away in some recent reports though!

TravelMag.com has published a recent report on “The 20 most charming towns in Ireland”. Happily, I can report that Waterford gets a mention with both Dungarvan and Lismore making the grade and featuring in this top 20. “Dungarvan has managed to retain much of its traditional Irish charm” and “Writer Dervla Murphy, who was born in Lismore, continues the town’s literary tradition.”

So, we can find some good news stories, it is just that they are, by their nature, harder to find!

There is a plaque, in The Granville Hotel, commemorating the gift of a clock to Mayor Meagher. Upon receiving the present he reportedly stated “NOT another bloody clock!”

Lessons in history are never really learned, but often espoused. 

Imagine ALL the people!

“No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.”

On Saturday last, we all marched, once again, for the very basic of welfare state rights. Better cardiac care, serviced by University Hospital Waterford.

I would estimate that around circa 6,000 took part in the march and I noted, perhaps for the first time on such an occasion, that there were significant numbers of “Older people” taking part. This was the silver generation getting out and voting with their feet. Something that Government should be very wary of, as this generation has real teeth (well some do)!

The social media pages have been awash with TDs’, posting pictures to let their adoring hordes know that they marched for us. With perhaps the exception of one, who has made it very clear that he will stand by his man. The youthful Minister Harris and that now infamous Herity report? A report that was given such precise “Terms of reference”, it would have been impossible to have had a different outcome.

Whilst, three quarters of the Waterford brigade were out in force, there appeared to be very little political support from our other sister counties. This is the root of our poor showing on this issue.

The national media and Government, see this as Waterford’s problem and NOT the South Easts’ problem. It suits the trolls working the corridors of power, to go out of their way to ignore so called one horse town issues. “LOOK! We are running a country.” Is that Waterford we hear moaning once again?

A Government so full of really quite clever, bright people, greedily working the system to massage their parish pump egos. We are very poor at this type of politics. It would suit our neighbours to have muted colleagues sharing a county boundary.

Unfortunately, we witnessed on Saturday little or no support from our nearest neighbours. Our fellow citizens, who are without doubt far worse off in terms of the Blues and Twos travel time, to Cork or Dublin. Swathes of Wexford are significantly over the “You’ve got 90 minutes or you might be dead”, life saving window. Yet, there seems to be absolutely little or no concern shown whatsoever?

The local newspapers across Wexford, Tipp and Kilkenny, will probably carry very very few column inches on the march. Some are just too concerned and preoccupied, with portraying Waterford Council, as acting like Adolf ‘H’ whilst attempting a 1939 style “Land grab”, than the health of a substantial proportion of their readership. They don’t see this as a regional issue. It’s as if the message is just not getting out to the people in these affected areas.

The people across the South East have for years and years, not been treated equally. There is no brotherhood of man. We pay the same taxes and yet we are constantly left short changed. Institutionalised discrimination towards Waterford appears to be a tsunami that cannot be stopped unless we have the support of those around us. Yet, getting that support will prove harder than finding a set of hen’s teeth. In fact, I fear it might be easier for us to seek out and discover, the whereabouts of the Holy Grail!

Our part-time catheterisation laboratory is of course welcome good news. Yet we have to accept the absence of no concrete plans as to when this life saving unit might arrive. Even more importantly, start operating. No one knows what those hours of operation might be? We don’t know how long it will be in situ? Will we even have sufficient extra staff to allow it to be operated efficiently? These open ended questions are just De Rigueur for Waterford. I can assure you this wouldn’t happen in Cork, Dublin or Limerick!

 

So, how do we move forward on this prickly issue? The campaign needs the urgent and fast mobilisation from the people across the region. For sure we all know that!

But here is the hard part. Is there truthfully the appetite for those people to get involved? Where are the voices asking, “We’ve got 90 minutes or we might be dead!!!!” 

“Are we there yet?”

“Are we there yet?” are the very words that we all fear, here in Waterford and the South East, when directly related to ambulance transfer times for cardiac patients.

These are the dreaded four words that no wife, husband, father, mother, brother, sister, grandmother or grandfather will every wish to ask, when accompanying a loved one, unfortunate enough to need cardiac care outside the Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm window available in University Hospital Waterford.

If you have not experienced the anxiety of this horrifying journey, and I have not, to Cork or Dublin, in the back of an ambulance, then none of us can understand the stress of knowing that the clock is ticking ever so slowly to and, more than likely, beyond that 90 minute safety window.

The simple fact is that getting to Cork and Dublin, even with the blues and twos, will in truth take longer than 90 minutes. One simple hold up, one unaccounted for set of road works, a sporting weekend, a car crash or simply hitting rush hour traffic, will eat into this safety time zone. No matter what spin is put on this by Minister Harris or other Government Ministers it would be a miracle if that 90 minute window, could ever be achieved in the real the world.

Perhaps, the Minister has never driven to Cork along the N25? It is at best an o.k. road and at worst full of bottlenecks, eating into any journey time. The road does not allow for consistent travel and therefore we cannot rely on time to getting to our sister Cork hospital for coronary care within the golden timeframe.

Going to Dublin now has a much better dependable journey time, up the M9 motorway. That is until you hit the outskirts of Dublin. Once again you are in the hands of the traffic gods and getting into the heart of Dublin can be hit or miss. Even if you are in the back of an ambulance, when every second counts, it is still a time gamble.

24th September 2016

Our Minister is adamant that he is “not for turning”, a modern day Mrs Thatcher perhaps. He has been at pains to let everyone know that the Herity Report, with all its flaws, will be taken as Gospel. The people in this South East region will forever be playing traffic roulette in the back of an ambulance.

I recall meeting Minister Harris, on a number of occasions, in his previous role with reference to his old portfolio, which included responsibility for national Government tendering. Thankfully, he listened to our reasoned and sound arguments to make changes, to allow local businesses to compete with multi-national companies and he did implement change on this basis. So we can take some encouragement from this. He is sometimes willing to listen.

As I have said many times, perhaps we have gone about this in the wrong way! Look at our Teflon neighbour, Mr Lowry, getting ALL that he wanted, in terms of local health care provision for Tipperary. We would not have heard about this, only that we started looking at what other “Government Independents” were getting for helping Enda come back into power. Mr Lowry went about his business quietly, methodically and ultimately delivered “exactly what it said on the tin” of his election manifesto.

Hook & Browne?

Have we been too naive in fighting this battle in the glare of the national media? Quite simply we have given the likes of Messer Hook and Browne the opportunity to use a substantial baseball bat, to bash Waterford once again. They are collectively laughing at us from their Dublin Towers. But rest assured if they were unfortunate enough to have to endure a 90 minute life or death journey in the back of an ambulance then their mindset would change in an instant.

We marched once again in monsoon like conditions, at the weekend, and received breviloquent RTE coverage. Where now for the Waterford and the South East?

What is guaranteed is that it will take more than 90 minutes to fix this dilemma.