The National Development Plan will not bridge the existing gap between the east and west of the country, and will even allow the divergence to grow, according to a paper presented to a seminar recently.
The paper, Will The National Development Plan 2000-2006 Bridge The Economic Gap Between East And West?, by a senior local government official, which has been seen by The Irish Times, was presented to a private seminar organised by the Local Authority Professional Officer branch of SIPTU.
The author pointed out that the Government policy of equal per-capita spending on the Border, Midlands and West (BMW) region, and on the South and East region (the two regions into which the State has been divided in order the qualify for the latest tranche of EU funding), would do no more than preserve the unequal status quo.
The description of the status quo in the region makes depressing reading. On every single indicator - population density, dependency ratio, educational attainment, disposable income, farm size - the figures shows the disparity in development between east and west (with the exception of an area around Galway city).
For example, in a more detailed breakdown of graduate employment by region, the figures quoted show two-thirds more graduates in the east are employed than are produced. In the west (including Galway), there is only employment for 80 per cent of the graduates. In the midlands, north-west and north-east this falls to 42, 33 and 24 per cent respectively. This amounts to a huge brain-drain from west to east.
This is reflected in the output per person (Gross Value Added). The figures show increasing divergence between the regions, with the south and east having a GVA of 110.3 per cent of the average for the State as a whole and the BMW region showing 71.4 per cent.
However, what is even more alarming, according to the paper, is that this gap grew by almost three points between 1994 and 1997, and this divergence is set to continue.
Only a major growth in economic activity can alter this, and the document warns that existing plans for infrastructural development in the region will not produce it. One of the most important issues for economic development is access, and in terms of all the different types of access the north-west is set to continue to be the poor relation, it says.
None of the regional airports except Galway provides a service for business people, which involves a minimum of two flights a day to the capital, so they are essentially tourist airports.
The region also loses out in terms of motorways. These are planned to run from Dublin to five cities, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Cork and Waterford; respectively the second, third, fifth, sixth and seventh cities in terms of size on the island. However, there is a notable omission from this list, the fourth-largest city, Derry.
The N2, N3 and N4 into the BMW region will be upgraded, but this will only allow for operating speeds of 80 k.p.h, compared with 110 k.p.h. on motorways. "The journey time from Dublin to Donegal and Mayo will be 31/2 hours, similar to what was available in the 1980s, which means potential investors will continue to be brought into these areas by helicopter or not at all," it comments.
The area will also continue to be under-resourced with gas, electricity and telecommunications. The BMW region has a very weak electricity infrastructure with only a 110-kilovolt loop line covering most of the area, compared with 220 Kv and 400 Kv lines in the rest of the state. This affects the quality of supply, with a constant danger of variations. This can have catastrophic effects on industrial production.
"Electricity and gas are very much interlinked in that gas-powered plants are the most efficient and around 400 Mw is the optimum plant size. However, the 110 Kv network could only support an 80 Mw station and this in turn could hardly justify the investment in gas network necessary to build such a plant. Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that a gas-fired plant will be built in the BMW region at least in the medium term," according to the document.
The telecommunications network in the BMW region also has about 20 times less capacity than in the east and south, it says. What this means is that emailing a document containing complex data like maps could take several hours from this region, compared to a matter of seconds from the south and east.
The document warns that the continuation of this disparity - which it insists will not be fundamentally altered by the National Development Plan - will have serious consequences for the whole State.