Ballaghaderreen students demand action on ‘economic apartheid’

Recent articles in The Irish Times and The Mayo News confirm our own research and fears when it comes to the Ten-T funding issue for the Border, Midlands and Western (BMW) region.
The articles have given our youth action group in St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen great hope.
Our research, which began a year ago, shows that we cannot but conclude that there has been negligence by successive governments that has caused the relative decline of the economic potential of half of our country, the BMW region.
Having studied a module on regional economics and economic indicators last year, in Transition Year with our teacher, Martin Daly, who is passionate about economic equality of opportunity, we have continued our research this year. We are so concerned about the serious lack of capital investment and poor industrial policies that one of us has coined the phrase Irish Economic Apartheid.
This might seem an extreme view but the EU’s own statistics showed that the BMW region fell behind the ‘other’ half of the republic by over 50 percent in regional GDP terms from 2007 to 2015. Is this the second repartition of Ireland?
From 2007 to 2015 Ireland’s GDP growth is at 38 percent.
However, the growth figure is negative, at -15 percent, when we look at the BMW region.
Things are still not improving in our own town of Ballaghaderreen. In the last few months we have seen the closure of a cigar factory with the loss of 30 jobs and local employers who shed labour when the construction boom ended in 2008 are nowhere near retaining their 2007 levels. The unemployment rate is almost three times the national average. Five retail units have already closed in 2018.
West Roscommon, south Sligo and east Mayo are a microcosm of the BMW region. There is either population decline or abysmal population growth. Many retail units remain closed. A report by Retail Excellence Ireland showed consumer spending is not growing much. Both The Irish Times and The Journal.ie revealed that one in five shops in Sligo town are still lying empty.

Culpable negligence
Alarmingly, the proposed Western Arc on the EU’s Ten-T transport infrastructure Core network has been relegated in status, meaning the BMW region is practically left out in terms of road, rail, port and airport upgrades.
That this relegation has been backed by our own State is a disgrace. To deliberately ignore one half of the country while the other is suffering terrible congestion and a housing crisis that bring its own social misery is absolute madness. The articles in The Irish Times and The Mayo News confirmed this, but also explained why. We are shocked.
This is not fake news. This is Ireland’s ‘Rust Belt’ and Brexit may make it worse. Investment in education and health in the BMW region is behind the rest of the country.
How many centres of excellence are there in the BMW region? Is there anything ‘national’ at all to be built here? Why is GMIT being run down? There is no university north of a line from Galway to Dublin. How many rural secondary schools that lost DEIS status have had it returned to them? St Nathy’s certainly hasn’t.
What of farm incomes? Steady decline while small farmers and hill farmers are not even at the negotiating table to protect what is the most environmentally friendly way of farming.
Since the Brexit crisis, rural hotels are the worst affected due to the drop in sterling. Much of the agri food industry, key to the BMW region, is already under pressure and will face even more turmoil if there is a hard Brexit and tariffs.

Knock Airport
What of a Western Economic Corridor or additional arc to the Ten T Core network that facilitates a greater north-south synergy for Ireland west of the Bann and west of the Shannon? It can connect Derry, Letterkenny, Enniskillen, Boyle, Carrick-on-Shannon and Sligo, spreading to Ballymote, Tubbercurry, Ballina, Foxford, Kiltimagh, Claremorris, Tuam, Galway and onto the south west and its towns. One that supplements, in a balanced regional way, the existing north to east to south Core arc.
Knock Airport must become a strategic industrial development zone, a national airport. Its designation as a regional airport where it is discriminated against in terms of public investment must end. SFADCO (Shannon Free Airport Development Company) worked for Shannon so we need a KFADCO, that will create thousands of jobs benefitting towns and communities in east Mayo, south Sligo, north Galway and west Roscommon.
A Western Rail Corridor could also form a key part of the Western Economic Corridor and the Ten T Arc must be modified to incorporate it and the rest of a Western Economic Transport Corridor, including road and Knock Airport upgrades, a deep sea harbour in the north west and faster installation of broadband if there is to be real equality on the island of Ireland.

Equality in education
Rural Ireland schools located in areas of high unemployment and welfare dependency must have their DEIS status returned. Greater investment in education is the key to our future
GMIT Mayo must become autonomous and have capital ring fenced for its development and either Sligo or Letterkenny and Athlone Institutes of Technology should be upgraded to university status.
Where will the billions come from to do all this? Ring-fence the repayment of the State funds by the banks for the region. Do not use the billions refunded to pay off debt, not when national GNP is rising and the debt GDP ratio is falling anyway.
The government needs to prepare for the future not fixate on a past which we didn’t make. Submit a modified Ten T Arc plan to the EU incorporating, and not isolating, the BMW region. Matching funds from Europe, for what is becoming a region left behind, should be easier to access.
Our Economics class comes from different political backgrounds but we are united in calling for radical change to the National Development Framework 2020-2040.
We want united political action that will end the financial straitjacket that is starving the BMW region of capital investment. It is time for unity of purpose in achieving a balanced country and economy, for all our sakes. We, young people of the West, will not settle for trickle down economics and second class citizenship.

MORE The youth coalition at St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen include the following students: James Albright, Uniza Alli, Madeleine Bell, David Cafferkey, Rory Callaghan, Declan Flynn, Diarmaid Geever, Liam Greene, Gemma Hallworth, Cameron Lunt, Ben Mann, Ashling O’Donnell-Fallon, Kevin O’Dowd, Kerry O’Reilly, Colm O’Sullivan and John Shannon.