Phoenix: Leadership and development

On the Cork Road the other day it was nice to see a tower crane on the site of the old Waterford Crystal offices. Major work is in progress on site and steelwork framing for an extra floor on the building, which will give it more presence, is in place. 

It took a while to materialise but in fairness to Frisby Construction, this is a huge project, which will transform that area. 

When coupled with the proposed student housing development at Ballybeg Drive, we will begin to see the core of the kind of university quarter that the city and south east region so desperately needs. 

Someone has to lead in the redevelopment and resurgence of this city or else we are at nothing. The Frisby Group has the resources and the ability, so let’s hope their investment and leadership pays off. Hats off to them! 

When will the government respond with its promised investment?

There has been visible dereliction around Kilbarry Cross area, the old Yellow House Pub site and surrounding lands for years. 

It symbolized the 2008 collapse after the glassworks closed and the hurt our city suffered. 

Sensible people in Fine Gael (they do exist) saw the damage to this city, Brian Hayes, Richard Bruton, even Enda Kenny. They had seen the positive impact of UL on Limerick and the mid-west and proposed the Waterford university. They campaigned on that basis in the 2011 election. 

Instead, after the election, the university proposal was dropped. 

The PPP scheme, to provide a new WIT engineering building and business school (outline planning was granted in 2009 as the contract winners would apply for full permission) was cancelled by Enda Kenny’s 2011 government. 

Two Waterford Fine Gael deputies (Coffey and Deasy) were elected at that time on the back of a promised university. That promise was reneged on. 

The glass factory site could have been bought for buttons by WIT but they were prevented from doing so. The fear of doing anything giving impetus to a stand-alone university in Waterford permeated the actions of the Department of Education and the Higher Education Authority.

Paudie Coffey, an excellent TD, lost his seat in 2016. Fine Gael in Waterford returned no seat in Dáil Éireann in 2020. Non-delivery has a cost. 

Fine Gael hurt Waterford and it would be interesting to try understand why that party would deliver with one possible new deputy, what they failed to deliver when they had two? 

Glib rhetoric from the present Taoiseach (no friend to Waterford while in the Dept. of Health or Further Education) and his local claque that the university for Waterford is “done” is borderline offensive. Without the promised funding, new courses, new student accommodation, new buildings, new corporate borrowing structures and professorial academic structures, nothing is done. When will we see that stuff? 

Our college is truly spancelled and some senior local FG members to my knowledge are deeply unhappy with what has happened. In particular, the damage caused to Waterford city by the loss of its name over its independent third-level facility. How can anyone with an ounce of Waterford in them defend that? 

The gap between Waterford and our one time peer cities of Limerick and Galway is now an abyss. Even Senator Cummins knows that. 

But, hey, party first, last and always, right? 

We have been reduced to what? A county town among county towns? An unforgivable disaster brought to you by Fine Gael.

The 15-year delay to build a new engineering building on the SETU Cork Road campus, coupled with the almost pathological suppression of new courses and the curtailment of student numbers at the college, has been truly shocking. 

Decent people in other parts of the country don’t believe it when you explain what has gone on. Such suppression did not happen elsewhere. In places like Sligo, Carlow, Athlone or Letterkenny, many new buildings have been provided with much investment in facilities. Even while universities in Cork, Limerick and Galway were being super-sized with students, student accommodation and new buildings, WIT was being beaten down. 

No new teaching space has been built for nearly two decades. 

When coupled with plans to downgrade UHW in the years after 2011, destruction of two VECs and FÁS HQ etc, the role of the city was destabilized. The impact on the confidence of our historic city was profound. 

This saga should be remembered for the crime it was. It reeked of totalitarian regimes and the suppression of educational facilities to damage political enemies.

This perversion of third-level educational provision did not start in 2011 with the incoming FG government, the previous FF administration had a hand in matters as well. But, while FF were prepared to continue the physical development of the WIT campus, FG and their Labour lackeys were not. 

The miserable politics of Phil Hogan and Brendan Howlin loom over that decision. 

Ruairi Quinn was the Labour Party minister entrusted with the evisceration of WIT. He did an excellent job. The wounds inflicted have still not healed. 

It’s somewhat understandable in the class-ridden panoply of Irish universities that the elitist blue-stockinged, sorry, blue-shirted FG and their academic camp followers would resist a full university for the plebs who live and work around here. Just imagine Penelope, they might even qualify as doctors! But is it the boast of party conferences that the actions of a Labour minister deprived the children of the working people of Waterford and the South East of a legitimate university. The university, which Enda Kenny, Brian Hayes et al of FG, freely promised in the run-up to the 2011 election!

In Ireland, there is no such thing as apolitical delivery. National Plans are relatively meaningless. 

Party strategists decide everything based almost solely on Dáil seat arithmetic. We have learned that to our cost in acute medicine, where unfulfilled development plans and proposals are endlessly recycled, in third-level education where funding and development proposals languish unfulfilled for decades, and in Foreign Direct Investment, where cynical IDA blurb about support for Waterford is recycled ad nauseam and large headline job announcements go elsewhere in this region.

Tell me, why should you vote for Fine Gael?