‘Wexford hasn’t done as well as it should’
WEXFORD is ‘a county of high unemployment which hasn’t done as well as it should have for decades’.
Minister Leo Varadkar, responding to a question from Deputy Mick Wallace about the fact that 18 per cent of the workforce in Wexford is on the live register, accepted that trends in the live register can give an indication of underlying trends in unemployment.
Deputy Wallace said that the Government had no problem crowing about a national unemployment rate of 6.4 per cent but were sheepish about acknowledging the live register figure in Wexford, which didn’t even take into account the number of people on job activation schemes such as Community Employment, Tús, JobPath etc.
Minister Varadkar said he didn’t believe ‘ that everything is rosy in the garden of Wexford.’ He said: ‘I appreciate that there are long-standing problems in Wexford. As Deputy Walllace knows, I lived there for a few months while I was a hospital doctor. I got to know the county and liked it a lot. It has a lot to offer. It has not done as well is it should have done for decades now and has a lot of the problems that the Deputy mentioned.’
Speaking after the debate in the Dáil, Deputy Wallace said: ‘In fairness to Minister Varadkar, at least he has acknowledged Wexford faces major problems. That’s more than any other minister in this Government or the last has acknowledged. It’s a cliche, but the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem and I think the Minister has done that. Given that the Minister has more than 50:50 chance of being the next taoiseach it might count for something. We’ll wait and see.
‘Sadly, Wexford is facing the same problems today as outlined in a rural development strategy prepared by Peter Bacon back in 2001. At the time Bacon stated there was evidence of high levels of deprivation and exclusion in Wexford when the trend nationally was for a decline in levels of deprivation and exclusion. Here we are 16 years later and very little has changed.’