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I’M THE LABOUR TD for Waterford and, along with health, the issue of employment is the one I’m asked about most often – and rightly so.
It’s no secret that Waterford and the South East has its difficulties with a high unemployment rate. Almost one in five people are without a job; that’s significantly higher than the national average.
The tide may be turning, however.
Just this week we had an announcement from Sanofi, a major multinational drugs company, that it will invest €44m euro at its Waterford Genzyme base. It will become the main plant for the production of ‘Lantus’ , a leading brand of insulin that will be supplied worldwide. It’s a vote of confidence which could create up to one hundred jobs in the process.
On Wednesday, Minister Noonan published the Finance Bill and, buried in this large document, was news of a pilot scheme which could be another step helping to get the buzz back into the city centre.
In case you didn’t know : Waterford is the oldest city in Ireland.
It’s where the Vikings first landed, and where Strongbow and Aoife got married. In recent times it has taken big hits on the jobs front, and the businesses in the city centre have suffered as the doughnut effect kicks in with many large shops moving to the outskirts.
The ‘Living Cities’ scheme is all about urban regeneration and the aim is to revitalise retail in Waterford City – and Limerick – through a series of tax incentives.
There are two strands – one focusing on incentivising local businesses to refit and upgrade their premises, the other based on encouraging people to live in historic buildings. Waterford has an abundance of beautiful period properties so it will be a good test location.
As regards the regeneration of the retail heartland; the focus will be on assisting and encouraging local business. This is NOT a back door return to the old investor schemes, where developers came in, bought property, claimed the reliefs then left the properties lying empty.
Retailers will be entitled to relief on works undertaken to upgrade or refit their shops.
Accelerated Capital Allowances, a type of relief which has been in place for quite some time, will be available to retailers to allow them to claim for refitting works etc over a period of seven years at a rate of 15 per cent for the first 6 years and 10 per cent for the final year.
It’s a small step, but I think it’s positive in the sense that it shows that this Government recognises that there are serious problems in Waterford and any measures or schemes that propose to tackle that are very welcome indeed.
We have a long way to go in terms of getting our fair share of investment in Waterford, but there are signs. A Pilot Scheme, a major investment from an international company. Site visits from the IDA have increased dramatically, and it has just invested heavily in a modern ‘smart building’ facility that will be another piece of the jigsaw. A local company that started up just over a year ago, Eishtec, now employs 400 people in Waterford, and 250 elsewhere in the South East.
Minister Bruton’s department has a dedicated Action Plan for the South East, with a focus on jobs for Waterford. A quick look at jobs.ie today shows 80 positions available in Waterford alone, not to mention neighbouring counties in the south east.
Behind the scenes, meetings are being had and work is underway with companies, and groups like the IDA being lobbied hard, and lobbying hard.
It won’t happen overnight. There’s a long way to go. But there are signs of positivity for places like Waterford, and lots happening behind closed doors that can’t always be reported in media.
So will this new ‘Living Cities’ pilot scheme make a difference ?
Maybe so.
It’s another piece in the slow jigsaw, and is a signal that Waterford’s issues are being recognised and that can only be a good thing.
Ciara Conway is a Labour TD for Waterford, and the Vice Chairperson of the Oireachtas Committee on Health,Children and Youth Affairs.
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Ossian. If it’s anything like the way you introduced ‘Deposit/Return’, it’s doomed to failure.
I had a look at their website. They are offering a laptop for €499, which was released 5 years ago. Not good value.
@Donal Ronan: the DRS has been a massive success
@Pat Hazzard: For whom?
@Pat Hazzard: Gee Pat, I thought I might have a bit more time, before the Government boys got in to work.
Are you there, since the Government Information Service days.
@Pat Hazzard: if you like queuing in the rain and having your home full of plastic bottles. The idea is to reduce the amount of plastics we use, not just a revenue source. Manufacturers should be using different materials in their production of bottles.
@Colette Byrne: You’re not allowed say that about private businesses!! The fact that most of Tescos packaging isn’t recyclable is just not a problem okay.
@Pat Hazzard: It’s been hugely embraced by consumers /s
@Thesaltyurchin: It’s not peculiar to Tesco, but it’s very random across products in any shop.
As a example in frozen, Supervalu’s brand of chicken chicken goujons are in a bag that is properly recyclable in a domestic green bin, but their chips or party foods aren’t.
Of course I know that the different products that have store branding aren’t made by them, they are ‘specially produced for’, but they have enough control to dictate what the packaging says and is made of.
@Pat Hazzard: How so ? It’s a double tax on every plastic bottle you use.
VAT and another one when you need to actually bring them back, spending money and time for it.
It’s a giant scam when we already pay a crazy amounts each month for bins to RECYCLE.
@Donal Ronan: I just had a look at their site too for laptops at 500€. All 4 are 5 year old models, which does make sense regarding how corporate cycles their purchases.
They are all fairly solid business models like Thinkpad or Elitebook, with the bog standard type of specs of an i5 cpu, 16gb ram, 256gb ssd.. except for one model of a Thinkpad that has touchscreen, an i7 and a 512gb ssd (it’s labelled Scratch & Dent). They all have a Win11 Pro licence.
They are all overpriced by about 50%,those models are worth around 300€ to 350€ even with a Pro license, but there is a certain value add with having a 1 to 3 year warranty from a place that can swap out a device with another from inventory within a few days. Businesses do like that more compared to a consumer that browses ebay.
@Alex: Not accurate. The deposit on the plastic bottles is refundable, and the benefit is plastic being recycled and not being dumped on the roadside. Blowing your preposterous dog-whistle.
@Nick Vasilakis: The problem with everything in Ireland, is we don’t know how to implement plans properly.
You have Ossian Smyth saying ‘ customers will return them when doing their shopping’. No extra travelling to dispose of them.
Then you have the boss of Deposit/Return coming out with the statement in the last week, that the system is busier at the end of week, that consumers should use it a different time.
You couldn’t make it up.
@Alex: Yeah. From the beginning of the domestic green bins, I’ve been paying increasing amounts while fastidiously separating and cleaning items that go into it. Those charges are inevitably going to rise further since the value of what is being collected in them has dramatically lowered. Cans and clear plastic bottles in particular are where they made the profit.
I seem to regularly be unfortunate enough, that when just pop down to the shop for a few beers and returning my empties (that despite rinsing and draining are magnets for fruit flies), that there’s only one working machine, and the person using it has 3 full garbage bags of possible returns.
I’m all for types like cleaners or security making some extra money by bringing stuff from the workplace bins instead of them getting trashed ( I would if still worked some places), but it does get a bit annoying when there has obviously been no attempt to check or drain in advance, and my 10 minute excursion turns into a near 1 hour one.
@Nick Vasilakis: I will concede the point that I rarely now see cans or bottles by the roadside, now it’s just a lot of fast food packaging, coffee cups, crisp bags and (surprisingly frequently) Harribo sweet bags.
@Nick Vasilakis: What it is doing is supporting the plastics manufacturers and their recycling scam.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report
Recycling plastics is harmful to the environment, and adds to the problem of Climate Change, instead of helping to reduce it.
And now the state is forcing people to support this scam at some personal cost, instead of putting the costs onto the producers, thus encouraging the producer to reduce plastic use and to find sustainable alternatives.
@ben wu: I’m sure that when the government comes knocking, the price of them will go up even more.
@ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere: I don’t fully agree with the overarching conclusion, but there is certainly a certain lack of awareness even with consumers that have the best of intentions, and due to companies that intentionally deceive.
Look at the triangular logo that has rotating arrows, with a similar appearance of what been told is ‘recyclable’.
Then look further into the number in the centre, and the type of plastic.
1 & 2 are PET/PETE or HDPE.. basically polyethylene that can be recycled.
3 is PVC, like a lot of microwavable tray stuff, and is not recyclable.
4/5/6/7 are a bit murky, mostly not to put in domestic bin, but some stores will take it, since some of those used are stuff like LDPE (low density polyethylene) , like the plastic wrap on a tray of shrooms or tomatoes.
7 is one that is basically a ‘erm… doesn’t fit into those other classes.’
It really should not need a science degree, to decipher those basics, or know that things like ‘the green dot’ is simply a scam.
@ben wu: We need to put the costs onto the producer, not the consumer who has no choice in the packaging the producer supplies their products in.
We need to move away from plastics packaging entirely, and encourage the producer to find alternatives.
To do that, the producer must be made to bear the cost.
Having the consumer bear the cost achieves nothing. The producer will happily continue to use plastics. And the consumer will have no choice in this. And the consumer will bear the costs of “recycling” – the cleaning, the storage, the sorting, the return…
And this new deposit scheme, which is also a cost to the consumer, no matter how this is marketed.
They must be remanufactoring all the missing lap tops from large Dublin hospital. A staggering number. That the hse couldn’t find, just before the big hacking. Another waste of taxpayers’ money.
@Colette Byrne: Doesn’t this ‘save’ money tho?
So you replace workers by lesser quality version but cheaper, let’s do the same with our infrastructure… I wonder how much money these politicians will make with their friends on that one
@Dominic Leleu: What infrastructure, we’ve already been doing nothing, for generations.
Will these laptops run Windows 11 or 12? If not then will the government move to Linux? Have they thought this through?
@John Hagin Meade: Will application software designed specifically for the government and its various institutions run on Linux?
(Of course, all app specific software should be run via a Web browser interface, making them OS agnostic, but that is a topic for another day.)
It would be great to see all state computers on Linux. The advantages would be numerous, but I wonder how many IT ‘professionals’ in this country would be capable of supporting a Linux platform.
Our Universities have been particularly lax in their IT courses when it comes to Windows vs Linux, with little training if any on the latter.
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