OPINION: Tracing rural Ireland’s woes to the Congested Districts Board’s dissolution

Concern about the decline of rural Ireland didn’t start in the 1950s. Today’s neglect of the northwest region had origins in the colonial period of British rule and deteriorated after the 1801 Act of Union. This trapped Ireland in a union chosen by a tiny governing minority.
Rebellions and background community violence discouraged British investment in Irish infrastructure and industry, resulting in a badly planned, dispersed pattern of population settlements. Shocking underdevelopment of the Atlantic seaboard turned a regional famine into the catastrophic Great Famine of 1845-47, with demographic consequences enduring to this day.
As land wars escalated in the late 1800s, the British Government belatedly made an effort to address the depressed state of the Irish western seaboard, which had become detached from the modestly growing prosperity of the rest of the island. Due to its isolation, Irish had remained the dominant spoken language.
The Congested Districts Board (CDB) was set up in 1891, given a budget by the British Parliament, a wide remit over development issues and an independent governing board of energetic people. It was a kind of Enterprise Ireland, but targeted on a region that had very distinct challenges across interacting social, economic and business issues.
In 1923, the Free State government had two options. It could reform the CDB, give it a catchier title and recognise that the Atlantic seaboard urgently needed a targeted and integrated policy mix different from the rest of the country. Alternatively, it could dissipate the complex responsibilities of the CDB across a wide range of independent, often non-cooperating, government departments.
The second option was selected. For me, that crucial decision represented the outbreak of a post-independence battle for rural Ireland, a battle that continues to this day.

‘Frugal comfort’
The main focus of the State was to reconstruct and modernise its infrastructure and industrialise from an almost zero base. Protectionist policies were invoked to kick-start industrialisation. Terminating payment of Land Annuities to Britain precipitated an economic war that reduced Irish farmers to cannon fodder when Britain retaliated. This was bad enough for big farmers, but catastrophic for the small and marginal farmers in the northwest.
The official vision of rural life entered fantasy land, notoriously articulated by Taoiseach Eamon de Valera in a 1943 speech:
“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.”
You may laugh at this extraordinary portrait of the future of rural Ireland, but deep down this is still the vision that drives modern approaches to rural development.
Under current policies, rural Ireland is unlikely ever to be ‘saved’, in any modern developmental sense. National development is targeted at a few cities and a selection of large towns which will provide the drivers of growth. Rural Ireland will transition into a native reservation version of De Valera’s idyll, watched over somewhat indolently by a centralised state. Winners and losers will be market driven. An unpopular view, but it helps to see the world as it is, not as we might desire it to be.

Elephant in the room
After reading a compelling article by Dr Liam Heffron in a recent issue of The Western People (‘The heart of another rural community [Moygownagh] has stopped beating’), I was forced to reflect on how these challenges might be addressed in a more effective way than they have been for past decades.
John Healy’s famous statement of the problem (‘No One Shouted Stop’), referring to the decline of Charlestown, is unlikely to be bettered. But Dr Hefferon makes the compelling point that lots of people were shouting stop and were protesting, but the urban growth juggernaut rolled on and regional/rural economies continued on their inexorable downward slide. A lesson to be learned is that shouting stop doesn’t work when there is a massive power imbalance and when the ‘shouting’ (David) side has no cohesive and co-operative programme to put in place of the State (Goliath) programme.
Inspired by the article, I sought out the RTÉ documentary first shown in March 2015, narrated by Richard Curran (‘The Battle For Rural Ireland’), in which Dr Hefferon participated. This is a film portrayal of John Healy’s themes, containing heartbreaking portraits of families being dispersed, local businesses going under and talking heads from mainly Dublin-based institutions explaining why all this is inevitable. It’s the economy, stupid! You cannot stand in the way of progress.
But I noticed a very strange omission: an elephant that should have been in the documentary room, but was not. Not a single politician, local or national, was interviewed on the programme. The absence of clerical voices was more understandable in light of the decline in the role of the Church in recent decades. Academic experts were prepared to speak factually. Politicians were hiding behind them.
To quote from the classic novel ‘The Leopard’, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Irish regional development resembles ‘a family quarrel we all know, with deeply entangled roots, impossible to cure because neither side speaks out clearly, each having much to hide’.
In this case, perhaps the problem is that neither side is listening and the northwest continues to decline. Even our colonial masters managed to listen between 1891 and 1922. Who is listening now?