Allister puts Northern Ireland's case on structural funding
05 July 2005
Speaking in the European Parliament today during a major debate on the future of Structural Funding, DUP MEP Jim Allister focused on the failure of the new proposals to deliver meaningful assistance for regions such as Northern Ireland. With expenditure loaded in favour of the new Member States, regions in the old EU 15 are set to lose out, even though many of those regions did not benefit from the generous Cohesion Funding which was available over the last decade. This was a point particularly made by Mr Allister in the course of his remarks, as follows:-
"The Structural and Cohesion funding package from 2007 to 2013 fails to adequately provide for those regions within the EU 15 which, though themselves deficient in infrastructure investment, failed, because of its national criteria, to qualify for Cohesion Funds.
Northern Ireland is such a region. Our water and sewage and roads infrastructure need huge investment - we haven't seen a mile of new motorway built in 30 years and our sewage system requires hundreds of millions of expenditure. Yet, we did not qualify for environmental and road infrastructure funding under the Cohesion Fund. Our nearest neighbour did and benefited from over 2 billion euros of EU aid for such projects from 1993 to 2004.
These proposals, with their almost total focus on the new Member States, do not recognise the glaring needs of regions such as mine. It seems our primary role is to spectate and help fund for others development, hitherto withheld from us.
I, therefore, call for a reconsideration of the real needs of regions from the EU 15 who are now in danger of being by-passed.
As for the European Fisheries Fund, it seems to me to be largely about managing further decline. Its prohibition on funding new vessels will do nothing to tackle the dangers and problems of an aging fleet. The fund, rather, should provide for the specific needs of the fisheries sector in each Member State and, if it did so, then modernisation would be top of the agenda in many areas.
Again with three-quarters of the fund designated for "convergence objective" regions, there is little being offered to areas such as Northern Ireland."
