Job losses - New ideas to rescue Waterford

THE callous but not entirely unexpected decision of Talk Talk to stick to its 30 days’ notice for 575 workers in Waterford brings to the fore an issue which has preoccupied people in the south-east for many years — the question of creating a university there.

Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton’s failure to convince the management to keep the call centre open for longer has dashed workers’ hopes, leaving many facing a struggle to keep up with mortgage payments. There is a strong sense in this tragic affair of the Government trying to close the door after the horse has bolted.

If, as Mr Bruton insists, the IDA has an early warning system in place to anticipate such eventualities, then clearly it is not working. Nor is there any denying that the south-east has been neglected as a centre for inward investment. Its traditional industries have declined, leaving thousands in Waterford city, its hinterland in the county and in Kilkenny and Wexford on the dole.

A university has long been perceived as crucial to the economic survival of the area. Perhaps the time has come for this Government to borrow a leaf from the North’s book on educational planning. When the question of a university for Derry arose during the 1970s and 1980s, the answer was both simple and effective. Of course there is no comparing the current situation in Waterford with the struggle for equality in the North in more bitter times, when society there was riven by political and religious differences. Yet the gulf which then separated Belfast and Derry involved many economic and educational difficulties redolent of those between the south-east and other parts of the Republic.

In the North, the palpable divide between Derry and Belfast prompted a solution that has worked in the face of considerable odds. A central theme of the debate at the time was the fact that every third-level educational institution west of the Bann was a polytechnic or technical college. But instead of creating a campus at Derry to compete in an unequal battle with Queen’s University in Belfast, the imaginative solution was called the new University of Ulster. This involved a radical change of mindset and involved redrawing the educational landscape.

A new university in Derry was called Magee; in Belfast it was Jordanstown; while Coleraine, the third link in the chain, was around 88km northwest of Belfast and 48km east of Derry. Instead of competing for funding, the cake was shared out between them.

In these straitened times, it should not be beyond the resources of highly paid officials in the Department of Education in Dublin to devise a similar plan. Let us call it, say, the University of Munster.

The development of a chain of technological universities, embracing Waterford and other sites around the province, would significantly add to the region’s strengths. As the Cabinet prepares to consider proposals for a university for the south-east, hopefully its horizon will be broadened to envision a Munster-wide complex of technology institutes on the lines of the Ulster experiment. Fresh thinking is needed.