I see the Gavins have a new pier. The only inhabitants of tiny Clynish island off the coast of Mayo, the family of five will enjoy a facility that has cost the rest of us €300,000.

Of course the Gavins are grateful, as they made clear to the minister who showed up last week to open the pier. Patrick Gavin Sr, who will be 80 in November, said he was particularly pleased because he is confined to a wheelchair. No more trips in the bucket of a tractor across a rocky shore when he has to go to the mainland for medical treatment.

Patrick and his wife live in one house on Clynish. Their son Patrick, his wife and 15-year-old son Padraig live nearby.

The pier is a huge improvement, Gavin Sr said. “Over the years, especially in winter, we were often marooned for up to a week.” It’s easy to say from a Dublin suburb, but being marooned for “up to a week” sounds like par for the course if you live on a remote island.

Good luck to the Gavins, but you wonder at the logic of a government spending €300,000 to ease the discomfort of one family. Housing estates with hundreds of residents will never see that sort of money.

Clynish’s pier is not an isolated folly. The budget for island development has risen from €2.5m in 1997 to €8.5m this year. More power to them? That’s exactly what the government said — eight islands have been electrified at a cost of €780,000 to the state and €700,000 to the ESB. A further €1m will be spent on improving electricity supply to nine more.

There’s plenty more piers where the Gavins’ came from — €4m is being spent on Inisturk’s, and there are plans for one at Inseghort (pop 1) and Inishlyre (pop 7). Inishbiggle, with a population of 39, is to get a €1.6m cablecar. Subsidised ferries link several rocks off the west coast to the mainland.

No man is an island, but Eamon O Cuiv comes closest. The minister for community, rural and gaeltacht affairs is proud to include the country’s 33 inhabited islands, home to 3,000 people, in his portfolio. Not since Peig Sayers puffed her pipe on the Blaskets have our islands had such a champion.

“This year I have managed to obtain a 9% increase in the annual budget for island development,” O Cuiv boasted recently. What Micheal Martin wouldn’t do for a 9% increase in the health budget.

It was O Cuiv, of course, who showed up at Clynish last week to open the Gavins’ pier. Some politicians would have been embarrassed; O Cuiv was ebullient. “One of the things

I am proud of is that we are as much concerned about an island with one person living on it as we are about an island with 900 inhabitants,” he said. “Everyone is treated inclusively.”

O Cuiv is taking the government’s policy of decentralisation to its logical conclusion. Next up are airstrips. A consultant’s report has recommended that several islands should have them (cost: €8.13m) and legislation is going through the Dail to give O Cuiv the power to provide them.

Eamon de Valera, the minister’s grandfather, had visions of comely maidens dancing at the crossroads but O Cuiv sees only modern-day Gaels landing on Atlantic outcrops in fixed-wing aircraft. But no independent economic or demographic analysis underpins his decision to sustain more than 30 offshore communities — 12 of them with fewer than 10 people.

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