I have pleasure in proposing this motion in my name and that of nine of my colleagues from the midland counties. The reason we put down this motion, which is not concerned only with rural development but in a much wider way with the development of the midland counties, is that in debates about regional development the midlands tend to be overlooked. There may be reasons for that which we all understand but they are not reasons we should let pass in the interests of the people who live in the midland counties and who face a series of problems that are almost unique to their situation.
The future of the Irish midlands is bleak unless the Government adopt the kind of strategic planning approach called for in this motion. Our demand for an integrated approach to the planning and development of the midlands is entirely consistent with Fine Gael's approach to regional development, an approach we set out in detail in January 1989, which concerns the kinds of structures needed in all the regions of the country to promote and inspire the process of development. We set out an overall approach at that time which would devolve to regional authorities functions and responsibilities in relation to planning and development. It is very clear that that approach is urgently needed today.
The wealth and the wellbeing of the midlands were traditionally based on their natural resources, peatlands and agriculture, and the industrial and commercial life of the majority of midland towns and intimately linked with agriculture and peat extraction. Industries and services connected with those natural resources provided the basis of almost all economic activity and the source of almost all employment in the midlands. For much of our history, the products of the midlands have been food, beer, spirits, leather goods and energy products. The supply of raw materials, machinery and other inputs for these activities was accordingly an important part of the economic life of the area.
This continued to be the position in the midlands for much of the period during which we attempted to accelerate — and in many cases succeeded in doing so — industrialisation in other parts of the country. For that reason less attention was paid to modern industrial development in the midlands than in other parts of the country. That might have been understandable at the time but the results could now prove to be very damaging for the midlands and for the people who live and work there. Today the two principal activities of the midlands are in serious decline. If present policies continue, agriculture in the midlands faces increasing difficulties. Prices of tillage products are coming under very severe pressure as the European Community moves towards what are popularly and wrongly called world market prices for these products. Farmers in the midlands will have very little choice but to become involved in the set aside programmes provided for under reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, driven largely by American interests, which have not been sufficiently or successfully resisted by Commissioner MacSharry and the European Commission. Even one of the palliative measures proposed by the present Government — the review of the disadvantaged areas scheme — which has led to all kinds of expectations throughout the midlands, is not likely to make a contribution of any kind to the income or structure of agriculture in midland counties before the middle of 1994 at the earliest, and that is a very optimistic expectation as to when we will see results from that scheme.
The effects of these restrictions on agriculture, which will become more severe on the life of midland towns, are already to be seen. Towns which once had a thriving industrial and commerical life based on their rural hinterlands are now literally crumbling at the edges. In any midland town one can see factories, mills, stores and houses deserted and decayed. Peat production and its related activities, once the mainstay of rural employment in huge areas of the midlands, are in decline and employ fewer and fewer people in a very different structure from that which we knew up to a few years ago. Electricity generation based on peat from our bogs is being restricted, with further restrictions in employment. All over the midlands there are unemployed men who will be the last generation to have worked on our bogs. All over the midlands there are townlands when entire households are unemployed or where all the young generation are gone and are employed elsewhere in Ireland or, in too many cases, overseas. We are seeing in a very real sense the disappearance of one of the main pillars of the economic infrastructure of the midland counties.
Many people fail to realise the depth of the problem or the significance of the decline. The average traveller between Dublin and the major centres of the south, the mid-west, the west and the north-west will probably be aware only of the increased ease of travel over roads across the midlands which are being upgraded with the assistance of Structural Funds from the European Community and of the ease of getting around previously congested towns by means of the new by-passes. However, what the average traveller does not realise is that, once you leave the main routes, access to many parts of the midlands is extremely difficult because the roads are so bad, and economic life is gradually coming to a halt. I intend no criticism by this but the average traveller who enjoys the upgrading of, for example, the Naas by-pass is totally unaware that a mile off the Naas by-pass in either direction the roads remind you of nothing more than a stormy night on the Irish Sea. I know the Minister knows perfectly well the road for example, from Edenderry to Rathangan, a road that would take all the teeth out of your head if you did not have a firm grip on your seat or steering wheel and did not keep your speed to less than 40 miles an hour.
In spite of all that, there is great potential in the midlands. Around the bogs there are rich mineral soils that could continue to produce a very good living for the population if the Government could persuade their European Community partners to adopt an agricultural policy for the Community that is properly articulated to the needs of the regions and that takes proper account of the different levels of dependency of different regions of the Community on agriculture and the products associated with it. In a world where non-renewable energy resources are being irrationally used and even exploited, a properly integrated national energy policy in this country would attach an importance to our peatlands much higher than that accorded to it by our current haphazard, piecemeal national energy policy.
We have barely started to think coherently about uses for our cutaway bogs, yet an immense amount of work on potential uses for those bogs has been done. An excellent and thought-provoking report was produced at the beginning of last year for the Department of Energy by a committee set up in February 1990 by the Minister for Energy, Deputy Molloy. Although this report deals with a great many issues and outlines a great many areas where decisions will have to be made, I have seen no statement of policy of any kind from the Government nor any indication of conclusions drawn from this report. Yet that report makes a number of points very clear. If we have the political will we can now determine how much cutaway bog will become available and at what rate over the next 20 years. That is a decision that is entirely within our choosing. We can decide how much of it becomes available, where it becomes available and when.
We could plan its use in agriculture, in forestry and in recreation if only the Government had the will to do that, but there is no sign of that yet. The enormous intrinsic riches of our natural wetlands as habitats for a variety of flora and fauna are very well known and documented. Yet, there is no indication of any coherent planning for the conservation of our unique environmental assets or for their use either for scientific or amenity purposes.
As far as I am aware, and I keep in touch with these matters, the only coherent planning activity for the conservation of any of our wetland habitats is being undertaken either by voluntary or local groups that are being supported by FÁS. That is not what FÁS are there for although I am delighted resources are being made available in that way. However, there is no coherent strategy for the identification and the conservation of any of these wetland habitats.
I was astonished and appalled to read the other day that there is now a serious threat to the survival of the curlew in parts of this country. I am not suggesting that curlews were ever widespread in the midlands, but this threat is indicative of the type of problems we are meeting. Almost unknown to us that species is in serious danger of becoming extinct without our having made any decision about it and without our saying what steps should be taken to conserve those habitats.
Given the decline in agriculture and in peat extraction as economic activities, we can now predict the course of rural depopulation and we can predict the course of industrial and commercial decline if no new action is taken along the lines we have set out in this motion. We should be setting out to designate centres of industrial and commercial growth in the midlands and to adopt the infrastructural and development policies that are needed to make them again thriving centres of economic activity. It may be that if we go into that process of planning and development we may have to come to the conclusion that not every major town in the midland areas can be a pole of growth, but if that is what we have to decide, then so be it. Let us at least make a conscious decision which towns we will designate so that we do not allow all of them to continue to slide into the state of slow and genteel decay into which most of our midland towns have now lapsed. We need a consciously directed policy to make any of those towns the centres of thriving industrial and commercial activity which they were in the past.
In proposing this motion my colleagues and I have two objectives. The first is to draw attention to the economic, social and environmental dangers which we clearly foresee for the midlands and to stimulate a response that will avert them. If the Minister of State reflects on this, and he and Deputy Power will know what I say when I, and my colleagues, contend that what we are facing is nothing less than the economic devastation of huge areas of the midlands unless action of the kind we propose is taken.
Our second objective is to underline once again the need for an enlightened approach to the process of regional development and the need to give the regions themselves real and clear functions in shaping their own futures. That is very much a part of what all parties in this House promoted during the recent debate on the Maastricht Treaty as the principle of subsidiarity. I would like to see the principle of subsidiarity being applied to our midland regions so that the people who live and work there, and who want to raise their families there, have a role in deciding what their future is going to be and can have a real expectation that there is an end to the involuntary, unplanned and unwanted decline to which they have been subject for far too many years.
Before I give way to my colleagues I make a final plea to the Government to withdraw the amendment that has been put down in the name of the Minister of State because the amendment says nothing about any policy or direction that the Government would take. It refers to "all of our rural areas including those in the midlands" as if there were nothing to distinguish the rural areas of the midlands from any other part of this country. I am saying they are different, and there is a lesson in that for regional development in every part of this country. All of our regions are different. There are specific problems in the midlands, just as there are in the mid-west, the west and the north-west. They need to be addressed specifically and that is why we put down this motion.