Efforts to develop the West will fail unless they are given "top-level" political support, according to the chief executive of the Western Development Commission, Mr Liam Scollan. Mr Scollan, who returned from Britain to take up the post last July, met the Taoiseach in Dublin last night to discuss the commission's work. Last week Mr Ahern announced that the Minister of State for Agriculture and Food, Mr Noel Davern, is to be given additional responsibility for Western development. Ministers from the West will also meet regularly on the issue.
Speaking before the meeting, Mr Scollan acknowledged that widespread cynicism in the West about developing the region was based on inaction by successive governments on a number of reports and developmental blueprints.
"It has been a bit of a political football over the past seven years," he said. If he did not see concrete action over the next 12 months he would not hesitate to speak his mind. "I don't think I should be wasting people's time if nothing is happening."
Mr Scollan said he would raise this cynicism with the Taoiseach at his meeting, and stress the urgent need to make progress on a number of development proposals. These included developing the tourism potential of the Shannon corridor, as recommended in previous studies. Bord Failte was responsible for this area. "What's happening?" Mr Scollan asked.
Many small towns in the West had factory sites on their outskirts owned by the IDA or local authorities. The commission believed that up to 8,500 jobs could be created in unemployment blackspots if those sites were marketed more efficiently.
Similarly, there was a need to co-ordinate coastal development and not allow it to proceed in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion. The commission was also pressing for road and rail infrastructural improvements, and extra support for Shannon and Knock Airports.
Mr Scollan said there was a real sense of frustration in the West that the region's potential was not understood by the "powers that be" in Dublin. It was important the commission be given a role in co-ordinating and linking the efforts of Government Departments in developing the region.
Without an integrated development plan, the Government would find it difficult to argue for the retention of Objective One status for poorer regions such as the West, when the European Union decided to remove such status from the State as a whole. "There is a vacuum in policy in Ireland in terms of regional development," he said.
The Western Development Commission is the successor to the Western Development Partnership Board, set up by government in April 1994 in response to the Western bishops' Developing the West Together initiative.
Formed at the beginning of the year, the commission has not yet made any major policy announcements, nor has it announced any substantial developmental projects. Most of the recommendations in a comprehensive £200 million Western development plan published in May 1996 remain unfulfilled.
Called The Challenge: A Positive Future Through Action its key themes were the empowerment of local communities and their participation in local development. At the time, the chairman of the Western Development Partnership Board, Mr Michael Farrell, said the plan represented "an end to the need to repeatedly state and restate the region's problems: emigration, depopulation, unemployment etc.
"It should, in the short and medium term, represent an end to the need to produce other reports of a similar character. It should represent an end to inaction."