Cavan best served as part of North-East – ministers

Two government ministers have insisted Cavan is benefiting from being part of the north-east regional enterprise plans, and add that the region is punching above its weight in attracting funding.

Speaking to the Celt at Thursday’s launch of the ‘North-East Regional Enterprise Plan to 2024’ at Cavan Town’s Digital Hub, Minister Heather Humphreys and Minister of State Damien English stressed that Cavan had many “synergies” with Monaghan and Louth. They assured Cavan was better positioned to drive forward enterprise plans through working as part of the three-county group.

The Anglo-Celt had suggested the ‘North-East region’ was an artificial construct, because essentially Cavan has limited connections with Louth; and towns like Dundalk and Drogheda prioritised.

Minister English began by outlining that, to achieve national plans, a regional structure is required to get “real drive”. When it came to allocating counties to regions, he recalled: “Cavan, Monaghan, Louth have had connections over many services when it comes to education, when it comes to health and so on. Our view at that time was that it did make a logical reason to connect them for regional enterprise as well.

“And I think you’ve seen the success of the region working together. I mean the jobs speak for themselves. If you see over 27,000 jobs over the last six or seven years - during some tough years for the region. That to me has proved a success. But this plan really is to try to go to the next level and it does take a couple of plans to bring the counties together to really build the connections.”

Minister Humphreys stressed “this is a very important collaboration between the three counties” and emphasised the cooperation between Dundalk IT and Cavan Monaghan ETB.

She points to an “intensive engineering skillset” as something that the counties in the region have in common; and it’s enhanced through specialist training provided in DkIT.

She added: “You have an advanced manufacturing centre in Dundalk, and that is to train people for the future of work on industry 4.0, etc etc. Then you have another very important investment here in Cavan Town, and that’s looking at upskilling in terms of the logistics industry.

“And you go over to West Cavan, and that area you have more investment into looking at how we can develop the cement manufacturing side of things. There’s a lot of synergies in this area.”

Project teams are essential in accessing Regional Enterprise Development funding, and a new fund worth €180m was announced just last week by An Tánaíste Leo Varadkar. The North-East already has four project teams primed to take advantage of the opportunity, whereas none of the other eight regions have any project teams established.

“And out of that will come a number of projects,” predicted Minister English. “They punched above their weight in previous rounds, and I think they’ll do it again too.”

The “previous rounds” is a reference to North-East drawing down €20.5 million out of a total of €100 million in Regional Enterprise Development Funding available to the nine regions nationwide.

Funding

The 15 project in the North-East, which previously accessed funding, are listed in the new plan. Under the heading ‘County’ seven are listed as Louth, four are listed as Monaghan and one is listed as Cavan. The ‘Cavan’ project is Cavan Monaghan ETB – a Further Education Training Centre for training and development of Supply Chain, Logistics and Procurement sectors.

The three remaining approved projects are listed as ‘Monaghan Cavan’ (Bioconnect Innovation Centre CLGs - office lab and Biotechnology research capabilities); ‘Monaghan, Cavan, Louth’ (Focused Engineering Network DAC - North-East Engineering Cluster); and ‘Leitrim, Cavan, Longford’ – (three Digital Innovation Hubs including Cavan Town).

By having project teams already established, the North-East stakeholders are closer to the point where they can access that funding.

“What’s important here are the projects that are brought forward out of these objectives, these actions,” said Minister English of the current plan. “So the teams now are looking at these objectives and will formally make applications to us for funding and, because they’re ahead of the game with strong teams putting projects together, they will probably be most successful again.”

Minister Humphreys added: “We want good projects coming forward and you get that when you get more collaboration. They are more successful and they deliver for more people. Counties working in isolation - I say: the only time you need borders is for football teams. You don’t need county borders for this type of investment in business.”

The Celt put it to the ministers that the many people will dismiss the Regional Enterprise Plan to 2024 as “just lip service” because there is no East-West Link. The long-mooted, East-West Link was intended to connect Dundalk to Sligo via Cootehill, but the route was not included in the National Development Plan 2021-2030.

Without improved road network, Blacklion is just shy of two hours from Dundalk; Cavan Town is an hour and a half, while Virginia is just over an hour.

Minister Humphreys responded: “The roads are being upgraded incrementally, and I know there is work to be done in that space.

“But having said that, there’s a lot that we can do. We talk about the digital world that we live in, and there are no borders. When we work digitally and work smarter, we can work better when we work together...

“And I’m very passionate that this is the right thing that we that we did in terms of putting Cavan Monaghan and Louth together. The people in South Monaghan always gravitate towards Dundalk. The people in Cavan have gone to college in Dundalk in DkIT and we want to build on that strength.”

Minister Damien English echoed this: “There’s so much opportunity here, but you won’t achieve it as one county on their own. The regions are the way to make this happen...

“They [three counties] are a strong region.”