Fine Gael councillors clash with Calleary over rural regeneration plan

MAKING PLANS An Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Heather Humphreys, TD, pictured at the launch of the ‘Realising our Rural Potential’ policy document last week.

Cross-party arguments continue over the value of the recently announced ‘Realising our Rural Potential’ plan

Áine Ryan

The Government’s new action plan for rural development, ‘Realising our Rural Potential’ has been dismissed across the Opposition benches as nothing more than old plans and policies glossed up in a shiny new report. The fact that Senator Rose Conway-Walsh (Sinn Féin) pointed out to The Mayo News last week that the promised investment of €50 million in the rural regions of the republic (not just Co Mayo) would be quickly depleted if the R312 was upgraded between Belmullet and Castlebar says it all. Indeed, to put it in further context, the purchasers of historic Westport House, the Hughes family, announced last week that they will invest €50 million in upgrading the facilities at the estate in the coming years.  
To be fair, the document, launched by Taoiseach Enda Kenny, also promised to increase Foreign Direct Investment by up to 40 percent and create 135,000 new jobs in rural Ireland by 2020.   
Expanding on his initial reaction, published in The Mayo News last week, Fianna FΡil Deputy Dara Calleary, observed that this ‘action plan’, a 71-page report, was the fourth such document published in the last 38 months, and ‘consists mainly of proposals and ideas which have already been announced’. He said that the money is coming from existing departmental budgets and that, ultimately, the winner of the Euromillions jackpot would fare better with his €88 million windfall than the people of rural Ireland would with this latest plan.
“We need a plan to reinvigorate rural communities in Mayo, but unfortunately this proposal falls short. Rural Ireland needs a strategic plan to enable all the regions to achieve their full potential. This plan must focus on investment in infrastructure to bring services such as broadband up to a high international standard. Further investment is also needed in our transport network to connect towns and villages. Businesses need access to high quality services to enable job creation,” Dara Calleary said.
He added: “We need to see a rebalancing of the focus and budgets IDA and Enterprise Ireland with the view to giving greater priority to the western region, and in particular marginalised and isolated communities.”

‘Give plan a chance’
ON the other hand, Killala-based Fine Gael Councillor Jarlath Munnelly challenged Calleary’s assessment of the new plan.
He argues that to ‘say it’s a re-hash of existing policies misses the point’.
“What places like North Mayo need – which is in slow steady decline for quite a while now, during boom and bust, under various governments – is a cross-government action plan. Of course, it should include existing objectives, and build upon them. I’m prepared to give this plan a chance to be that agent for change, and I’d be the first person to be critical if the targets in it aren’t met,” Cllr Munnelly told The Mayo News yesterday (Monday).
“I think it’s easy to make lazy statements criticising an action plan like this, there’s good and bad in it, and there are new innovative proposals in it too. I think the specific targets for job creation in rural areas is a good idea, and the past governments record shows that targets for job creation were not just met but exceeded,” he said.
His Fine Gael colleague, Cllr Tereasa McGuire disagrees ‘strongly’ with Deputy Calleary’s comments.
She said: “This Government has put Ministers Humphreys and Ring in situ with the briefs of rural and regional development. This new plan is opening the door for many communities to have a dialogue and access funding. It is putting the rural communities to the fore and empowering them to develop and grow.”

Did you know?
The population of Connacht was 1.4 million in 1841, had dropped to 611,000 by 1911 and further collapsed to 542,000 by 2011.