EU funding fiasco raises serious questions

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER Leo Varadkar and Michael Ring – Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport and Minister of State for Tourism and Sport in 2011 – outside Michael Ring’s office in Westport last May. Pic: Conor McKeown

In a world of clickbait and low attention spans, many stories of great public interest struggle to grab people’s attention.
We have no doubt that of all the articles read by people from the west in the last seven days, last Thursday’s Irish Times news story about Ten-T European funding was well down the list when it came to reads, clicks, shares, likes and comments.
But no story about the west was more important in the last week – or year, for that matter.
This is a complex issue, hard to summarise in brief or to hold people’s attention for the time required to comprehend it. Perhaps that is how it has escaped the scrutiny it ought to receive.
But stay with us and we will try to distill it down.

West taken out
The fund for the Ten-T – the trans-European transport network – is the largest infrastructural fund in the EU. It provides substantial monetary support for road, rail, port and airport projects.
Around €320 billion has been set aside for this fund across Europe until 2030. The primary tranche is for EU countries’ ‘Core Networks’, with roughly 90 percent of the total budget set aside for projects in this network. The remaining crumbs will go to projects in the smaller, comprehensive network.
Each country decides which networks it considers to be core, and therefore eligible for funding from the large piece of the funding pie. The Irish Times obtained, via a Freedom of Information request, documentation revealing that while he was Minister of Transport in 2011, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, at the stroke of a pen, took the west and northwest out of plans to be part of the country’s Core Network.
If the north and northwest had been left in the Irish Core Network, it would have been a game changer that would have greatly enabled projects like a Galway to Derry motorway, a significant upgrade of Knock airport, the completion of the Western Rail Corridor to Sligo –and much, much more besides.

Round-island route
The Taoiseach’s argument for taking the regions out of Irish Core Network was that after the economic crash, Ireland could not afford the self-generated funding it would have had to commit in order to avail of the Ten-T fund.
Yet, the Government saw fit to leave Dublin to Cork and the Dublin to Belfast sections in the plans and, what’s more, added a new section, from Portlaoise to Limerick, to the Core Network.
But the section known as the Western Arc running from Belfast through Derry, down to Sligo, Galway, Limerick and Cork was removed. Had the Western Arc gone ahead, it would have tied in with the Belfast to Dublin to Cork core network, which is still provided for, and it would have formed a perfect orbital route of the island, enabling much more balanced regional development.
The Ten-T is a modal interconnection so therefore must consist of air, road, rail and port projects. It also needs to be cross-border, which the Western Arc would also have been.

Fishy figures
Defending the decision this week, a spokesperson for the Taoiseach told The Irish Times that European funding would ‘have only covered a minority element’ of such costs, going on to say it would cover just 30 percent of the future Core Network project costs.
The remaining 70 percent, we were told, would be the responsibility of the member state, and Ireland was not in a financial position to take on such a responsibility in 2011.
Perhaps, but some of the figures do not tally.
Responding to a DΡil question from then Mayo TD Michelle Mulherin in January 2012, in which Mulherin queried the removal of the Western Arc, Leo Varadkar said that member states would be liable for 90 percent of project costs – not the 70 percent his spokesperson quoted last week.
Furthermore, neither of these figures tally with those in an EU document in 2011 setting out the terms of the new Core network.
The document stated that in the case of cross-border projects, member states can avail of up to 40 percent of the total study and construction costs for cross-border projects, such as the Western Arc.
Of course the elephant in the room right now is Brexit, but that could present a great opportunity for the Taoiseach to revisit the decision with the EU during ongoing negotiations, and, for once, flex Ireland’s muscles in such talks when we are in a position of strength.

Mayo influence?
But questions have to be asked about how the then Minister for Transport was allowed to remove and sideline the west so easily in 2011. Sure, there was a financial argument – but a far from insurmountable one.
A more pertinent question is how such a decision was made when there was a Mayo Taoiseach at the time and, in Varadkar’s own department, a Mayo Minister of State, Michael Ring. How aware were Enda Kenny and Michael Ring of what was happening? Did they try to intervene?
Certainly the inclusion of Limerick to Portlaoise would lead one to consider that the then Minister of Finance, Michael Noonan, may have used his influence in his neck of the woods.
All we do know is that then MEP Jim Higgins, a man not given to parish-pump politics, warned Varadkar that his decision could close off projects in the west from EU funding ‘for good’.
A man who knows a thing or two about European funding told this newspaper before that the removal of the Western Arc from the Ten-T represents ‘the biggest larceny west of the Shannon in the last 50 years’.
Finally, the siren has been sounded thanks to good, old-fashioned investigative journalism in The Irish Times. Let’s hope it’s not too late to shout stop and halt such a larceny.