Rural Ireland has ‘bright future’ under development plan – Tánaiste

Rural Ireland has a bright future with the National Development Plan (NDP) offering people the opportunity to capitalise on new working trends, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said.

Mr Varadkar said a lot had changed since the NDP was first launched three years ago with the pandemic in particular having a huge impact on how people work and organise their lives, and the revised NDP takes account of such changes.

“This is not simply an updating of the last NDP, rather is a strengthening of the plan, stitching in improvements that will help with its implementation and respond to the needs of our people whom we estimate will reach six million by the middle of this century,” he said.

“The world has changed since Project Ireland was launched in Sligo back in 2018 – particularly as a result of the pandemic and we need to anticipate what the Ireland of 2040 will be like, what will our jobs be, how will we travel and how will we live?”

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Mr Varadkar said that he was never one to subscribe to the view that rural Ireland was in decline and the new NDP anticipated a dynamic rural Ireland where towns and villages will flourish through the provision of public infrastructure.

He said that since 2017 the percentage of Ireland's national income committed to public infrastructure has risen from 2.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent today which was well above the European Union average and peer countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, but this would rise further under the new NDP.

“This revised National Development Plan will see the amount of our national income which we are committing to public infrastructure rising to 5 per cent by 2030 which will see our investment in public infrastructure go from €12.7 billion this year to €19.3 billion in 2030.

“The success of rural Ireland is about the number of people living there, creating their families there, working there, the number of new business, the quality of infrastructure and the quality of life – I think the pandemic has really illustrated the real potential rural Ireland has for the 21st century.

"Minister Heather Humphreys is working to ensure flexible working become as lasting legacy of this pandemic especially for our rural towns, villages and districts – it's going to be permanent shift in how and where work is done, Rural Ireland has a bright future," he said.

According to the NDP, every home, school and business in Ireland, regardless of how rural they may be will be provided with high-speed broadband by 2040 with the bulk of connections taking place this decade.

This will be achieved through a combination of €2.7 billion in Exchequer funding under the National Broadband Plan (NBP) complemented by multi-billion euro investment programmes by commercial operators primarily in cities, towns and villages, according to the NDP.

Under the NBP, 1.1 million people living and working in over 544,000 premises including over 100,000 businesses and farms along with almost 700 schools will receive access to high-speed broadband with the roll out of the network to be completed in the next five to seven years.