Cabinet meeting impresses western leaders

The chief executive of the Western Development Commission (WDC), Mr Liam Scollan, spoke positively last night about a meeting with the Government in Ballaghaderreen yesterday.

He said they had "got the feeling that here was a Cabinet terribly interested in engaging with the region".

"Even in a European context it was one of the most significant engagements of a Government with a region," he said.

At yesterday's meeting with the WDC in St Nathy's College, Ballaghaderreen, Mr Scollan told the Government that "at long last things are happening in the west".

However, while the availability of resources was no longer the key issue following the National Development Plan, the real challenge was to "fast-track improved roads, ports and airport links, the energy supplies and telecommunications services, and the human resource skills, which are urgently required".

Commission members told the Cabinet of the need to add the N4 and N5 routes to key infrastructure projects.

They emphasised that the west could not afford to wait two years for a national spatial strategy, The commission chairman, Mr Sean Tighe, said the presence of the Cabinet "dramatically symbolises the new elevated status of the west in national policymaking".

The Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, Mr Ahern, said yesterday that decentralisation plans, to be announced by the Department of Finance shortly, would make "a very significant difference to regions like the BMW".

He was speaking at a consultation forum on the National Development Plan 2000-2006 with members of the Border, midlands and west (BMW) regional assembly at Ballaghaderreen yesterday.

"Decentralistion to rural parts has the capacity to regenerate towns in a permanent way, in that the jobs are permanent," he said.

On the platform with him were the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, and the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue.

Mr Martin said that over the next seven years FAS would spend £1.1 billion in the BMW region and planned to assist 15,000 unemployed people there each year.

He said £400 million would be spent on capital education projects in the region over the seven years and that a major initiative to prevent early school-leaving, "the single largest factor behind long-term unemployment", was being planned.