VOLUNTARY ORGANISATION Council for the West has criticised a proposal by the McCarthy group to abolish the Western Development Commission.
Any such move would be a “very retrograde step” at a time when the west “cannot afford another major brain drain” due to emigration, council chairman Seán Hannick has said.
The McCarthy report on public expenditure recommended that all indigenous enterprise functions, including those carried out by the commission, should be merged into Enterprise Ireland.
The commission was set up in 1997 by the Government to ensure the development of the region economically and socially and is responsible for a number of socio-economic initiatives, most recently the Lookwest campaign to encourage people to live and work in the region. Its work has been supported by the Council for the West, which was formed after western bishops held a conference in 1991 to highlight serious challenges in the region.
Mr Hannick said that 34,000 extra people had signed on the live register in the western region to August of this year, according to most recent statistics.
“Our unemployment rate has more than doubled,” Mr Hannick said. While “all regions are suffering”, he said, “the western region’s infrastructural inadequacies” were “undermining its competitiveness”.
“While the major inter-urban routes to Belfast, Waterford, Cork,Limerick and Galway are all due to be competed by 2010, the poor condition of the N5 linking Mayo and Roscommon to Dublin is costing Mayo industries an estimated €2.5 million annually in lost time,” Mr Hannick said.
The Bishop of Elphin, Dr Christy Jones, a Council for the West member, said that unless the west received the intervention it required, there was “a very real danger that emigration will once again be allowed to take over”.
“I hear talk of city regions and phrases like ‘smart people like smart cities’,” Dr Jones said in a statement. “The west of Ireland is different, it is made of up of many small towns and rural areas.
“This centralised thinking and associated national policies will not accelerate the development of the west in the way in which it will retain its people, attract others and grow enterprise exploiting its natural strengths.”
Dr Jones called for a vision which also identified “what kind of society we want”.
He added that 2002 had been a “turning point” for areas of the west, as it was in that year that Leitrim’s population grew for the first time since census figures were collected in 1841.
Young people had been repopulating rural parishes, he added. “We can only hope now that they never know the pain and devastation of emigration,” Dr Jones said.
The commission had criticised the McCarthy report recommendations in a recent submission to the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service.
It warned that there was a very real danger that national cuts would have a “disproportionate effect in rural areas”.