The people of the west are receiving a signal from the Government "that they haven't got a fair crack of the whip" because of the continuing delay over the £25 million Western Investment Fund, the chairman of the Western Development Commission has said.
Mr Sean Tighe said that as far as he was concerned "D-day" was fast approaching on the issue and the Western Development Commission (WDC) would not allow itself to be "fobbed off" any longer. Its credibility was being damaged because many people hoping to avail of the fund since it was announced over two years ago had given up on it.
"The board has made it clear that this issue has to be resolved by the next meeting on October 6th, and as far as I am concerned there will either be no fund, or the fund will be up and running. We cannot continue to be fobbed off or to fob off people looking for assistance."
Mr Tighe said a fund development manager had been appointed for the past two years. Responses to queries from entrepreneurs wishing to avail of the fund had been "duplicated 10 times over".
The WDC is a statutory body charged with spearheading economic and social development in the seven western counties from Donegal to Clare. It was set up under the previous government and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has insisted that the Government is fully committed to it.
It was put on a statutory basis on February 1st and it was expected that the £25 million Western Investment Fund, an equity fund to help people starting or expanding businesses, would be operational from then.
However, the WDC in Ballaghaderreen learned in April that the Government had never consulted the EU on the terms of the fund, despite the fact that any form of State aid must get Brussels approval.
A senior European Commission official told this column in June that the usual procedure was for member-states to notify the EU of any such scheme when the legislation was being drafted, and not afterwards, as it would then have to be suspended pending Brussels approval. However, this is what happened in this case.
The WDC had presumed until April that the Government Department responsible, Agriculture and Food, had submitted the scheme long before the agency was put on a statutory basis in February. The scheme was finally submitted to Brussels in June and the issue has dragged on since without any obvious progress. EU officials responded with a number of queries, which were answered by the Department, and then more queries were received.
The latest were received within the past few weeks, and Mr Tighe said this was "the straw that broke the camel's back" as they were very mundane. "They were the most basic questions, such as: `What is the fund going to be used for?' I can't understand how they could be asking questions like that at this stage. The scale of the fund is so small in European terms that I cannot see what the problem is."
A four-way meeting of all the parties - the WDC, EU officials, the Department of Agriculture and Food and the Department of Enterprise and Employment - had also been requested by Mr Tighe, but this never took place.
"A four-way meeting would have resolved everything within minutes. If the fund cannot go ahead, then leave it, but otherwise define the rules under which it has to operate and work within them," said Mr Tighe, himself a Co Donegal entrepreneur.
He said the WDC was in no way responsible for the delay and he hoped people in the west understood that. "The signal this is sending out to people in the west is that they have been right all these years; that they haven't got a fair crack of the whip."
A spokesman in the Department of Agriculture and Food said the continued delay was because the European Commission was "very particular about state aid". However, a decision was expected "any day now".
He said the Department had told the Commission what the fund was to be used for long before the latest list of queries was received, but this was sometimes used as a ploy by the EU for more time.
On Mr Tighe's request for a four-way meeting, he said: "We didn't think it was necessary because we had meetings with Enterprise and Employment and we were also in contact with DG 4 [a section of the European Commission], so we didn't think anything more would be advanced with a four-way meeting."