Rural thoughts from the centre

THE Irish Times recently contained a curious column written by Michael McDowell, former leader of the Progressive Democrats (PDs), former Tánaiste and currently a Senator on the National University constituency. The PDs, you may recall, were the nearest Ireland ever came to having to a truly neo-liberal political party. They took liberal positions on a range of social issues and supported market-oriented reform policies such as deregulation, lowering trade barriers and reducing direct state influence in the economy through privatisation and fiscal austerity. Philosophically, they were nearer to Boston than to Berlin. Electorally, they were further to the right than most Irish people wished to go.
Although Senator McDowell is no longer in a position of power that would enable him to implement his policies, he is nevertheless an articulate and thoughtful man. However, his ideas and the constrained perspective that he brings to looking out at ‘rural’ Ireland from his Dublin base are very typical of most active politicians in today’s main political parties.
This perspective is at the centre of current public policy on national development, as embodied in Project Ireland 2040 and its three sub-regional off-shoots. It is a perspective of five cities (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford) and the rest of the country is treated as a kind of problematic afterthought to be addressed in terms of palliative community support.
The column explored two themes: that living in rural Ireland shouldn’t be an impossible dream and that balanced regional development means more than ‘plonking cities here and there’. The word ‘rural’ is used sixteen times, but is never defined with any precision.
To many big city dwellers, and specifically to Senator McDowell, the ‘rural’ population seems to consist mainly of isolated farm houses scattered across the landscape, deprived of most of the advantages of city life, continuing in a process of decline, and gradually losing the pathetically few facilities that they still retain (schools, post offices, shops, pubs, surgeries, etc).
Senator McDowell would like young people in ‘rural’ Ireland to be able to continue to live in the area where they grew up and he seems to think that our draconian planning laws are the main barrier to their freedom to do so. If one can extract a policy recommendation from his column, it is that current planning restrictions on constructing isolated houses located distant from existing towns and cities ought to be abolished.
No so simple
IF only it were that simple. Young, increasingly well educated people will continue to want to live outside the five Irish cities only if they are near thriving towns that generate and sustain high quality employment opportunities and an enjoyable and fulfilling social and family life. Without such towns, a planning permission free-for-all will simply generate more holiday homes for city dwellers and perpetuate out migration.
The polarisation between urban and rural Ireland is at its worst in our Northern and Western region that embraces eight counties from Donegal in the north to Galway in the south. With the exception of Galway city (population 85,000) located in the extreme south of the region, the next largest towns are Letterkenny (23,000), Sligo (21,000), and Castlebar (13,000). So the regional development answer in the N&W region should not be to scatter population randomly across the area. Rather it must be to build infrastructural links between the region’s many existing and often dynamic smaller towns so that, as part of a linked network, they can better take on the desirable employment creating features of larger towns and cities that it does not currently have and is unlikely to have over any reasonable time horizon.
Senator McDowell draws attention to the economic cost implications of a scattered pattern of rural living that is an unfortunate legacy of our troubled colonial history. But anyone who witnesses the transport chaos in our main cities, and the dysfunctional and expensive costs of urban infrastructure might well come to the conclusion that a more devolved pattern of living shared more equitably across the whole nation could well be both cheaper and provide a higher quality of life.

Tipping point
DEVELOPMENT policy in Ireland is dangerously near to a tipping point. The failure of decades of ill-conceived regional development policies has resulted in the emergence of a sprawling and dysfunctional Dublin metropolis with somewhat lesser growth in the other four cities. Political representation has followed population growth and the needs and potential of proper regional development slips ever further down the list of political priorities. The challenges of preventing the implosion of the greater Dublin region has come to dominate national infrastructural planning and capital allocations. Consideration of how a more balanced regional development could alleviate the disasters of our distorted population distribution are neglected as a result and we risk a downward spiral of lack of regional investment.
In the late John Healy’s 1968 book, ‘No One Shouted Stop (The Death of an Irish Town)’, he spoke of the economic and social decline of rural life in Charlestown and the west of Ireland in a time of widespread poverty and mass emigration. Were he writing today, he would be concerned with the inability of the west to participate fully in the national economic progress of the island. The outcome for Charlestown and places like it remains the same, for richer or poorer. The fate of Charlestown and places like it now seems less of a death and more like the economic fallout of a bad divorce.