The failure of the funding application for the vital Port Access Northern Cross Route for Drogheda has left everyone, not least the Louth County Council officials, reeling and looking for answers.
It seems that everyone, including Minister Darragh O’Brien and the officials in his Department wants and can see the importance of the PANCR but somehow the application was still knocked back.
The Minister was careful to praise the council officials for their work but it sems that the application was never going to be accepted because it was made to the wrong authority!
You really couldn’t make it up.
The government of this country and all its constituent counties is done in such a convoluted way that is constantly changing that it is no wonder that things can often go wrong.
Even the language that is used at meetings is so baffling that, to the average punter, it might as well be carried out in an obscure foreign language.
Just to make proceedings less intelligible the rules and criteria are constantly changing. It is like a game of football where the referee can change the rules at any time but is not obliged to tell the players.
This whole PANCR debacle is an illustration, if one was needed, of what is wrong in both local and national government. Common sense and initiative always play second fiddle to rules and regulations.
Can you imagine the board of a private company coming up with an idea that everyone thinks is brilliant, everyone can see the advantages it would bring and the money was there to do it, but after almost 20 years of board meetings and discussion, manages NOT to implement it?
Minister Darragh O’Brien has a lot of questions to answer, as indeed do his predecessors, as to how they can have allowed this ridiculous situation to arise.
Our political representatives, both local and national, must demand a meeting with the Minister and his top advisors along with Joan Martin and her team at Louth County Council to sort out this mess as soon as possible.
As has been said countless times over the past 15 years, the people of Drogheda need this development for all manner of important reasons which everyone knows about.
This issue can be decided quickly but it needs our leaders to engage in a meaningful manner, to forget their party political differences for once and, using plain language and common sense, get the job done.
This is too important for slagging each other and laying blame; the people of Drogheda can’t wait another year for such a vital decision for our town.
The alternative is that, unless the politicians and officials get their fingers out, Drogheda will continue on its path into decline.
