POLITICS: Fianna Fáil candidate for Donegal Charlie McConalogue has pledged to revitalise towns across the county through a range of initiatives to ensure that the recovery is felt outside of Dublin and the commuter belt.
McConalogue told Donegal Daily, “Towns like Buncrana, Letterkenny, Stranorlar, and Donegal have been neglected by this Government.
“We are all too familiar with the sight of boarded up shops on our main streets and empty retail units dotted around our towns and villages.
“The lack of investment in broadband and other infrastructure has been hampering the recovery of Irish towns; we cannot expect our regions to compete with Dublin for investment without modern fibre resources.
“Fianna Fáil will put in place the necessary measures to help our town centres fight back. We will create ‘Town Teams’ by drawing together community, business, political and Garda representatives to draft plans to revitalise their town centres.
“The ‘Town Teams’ will then be tasked to undertake an ‘Empty Shop Initiative’ which will earmark empty units and work with community groups who need space, to ensure they are used.
“We will revise the retail planning guidelines to focus development on town centres and out of town developments will have their floor space restricted.
“The post office lies at the heart of many rural communities. We will support the post office network by expanding Post Office services so that they act as central offices for state payments and charges like motor tax, local authority charges, hospital charges and banking services.
“We will ensure that post offices become a hub for shared community state services as well as an office for broadband access and printing facilities.
“This Government has no plan or policies to rejuvenate our towns. If re-elected, the boarded up shops will remain as Fine Gael’s two tier society continues. Fianna Fáil will invest in our towns, ensuring that every community feels the recovery and not just the privileged few.”
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