Island primary schools a litmus test for future sustainability

STUDY Dr Peter Gill.

Áine Ryan

THE ‘gentrification’ of Ireland’s offshore islands poses a real threat to their future sustainability. However, in the case of one Co Mayo island, Clare Island, a fish-farm is ensuring the future of its primary school, and thus its population.
That is according to Peter Gill, Professor Emeritus of Education at Gävle University, Sweden, and a resident of Clare Island and Sweden. He believes that some Irish islands may be in danger of following the Swedish pattern, where schools have been ‘mothballed’ to encourage parents with younger children to out-migrate.
A study by Peter Gill and GrΡinne Kelly, entitled ‘Rural Schools as Hubs for the Socio-Educational Development for the Community’, argues that an island’s primary schools significantly ‘contribute to communal sustainability, viability and vitality’.
The case study examines the huge trend of migration towards urban centres and the purchase of island properties by ‘the bourgeois for holiday homes’. Sources say that almost 50 percent of Clare Island’s houses and apartments are now owned as holiday homes.
Its results were presented by Dr Gill at a European conference on education held in UCD last week. They reveal that while Ireland’s more-populace eleven inhabited islands have 13 schools, Sweden has 541 inhabited islands, with 39 schools on 33 of them.
Gill argues that ‘a classic challenge to the survival of small rural communities is the closure of the local primary school’.
“The facts are hard for at least four of Ireland’s islands, with two to eight children in their schools. In the Swedish ‘gentrified islands’, for example Sandhamn which has over 100 all-year-round  inhabitants but over one thousand summer residents. It has no children of school-going age, the Government has decided on a policy of ‘mothballing’ schools in the hope that some ‘young families’ will out-migrate to the island”, he says.
“Crucial to the modern evolution of Clare Island’s school is the number of families who work on the fish-farm with children attending St Patrick’s,” he added.
He says population statistics from the Irish islands reveal that the majority of their populations have dropped by 90 percent in the last 170 years, from a time when these regions were deemed ‘congested’ and the subject of a major government policy, under the remit of the Congested Districts Board.
“In 2009 more than half the world’s population lived in urban regions, and this drag to municipal centres remains unabated. Islands are at the forefront of this demographic perturbation, which involves significant depopulation and symbolic, partial, repopulation in the process called ‘gentrification’. The study uses examples from Sweden and Denmark, but this is the case worldwide. The bourgeois of the urban regions have, first of all segregated themselves, by habitation segregation, usually economically, through the price of houses.
“The ultimate phase of this phenomenon is where the bourgeois move into the very centre of the cities – Stockholm, Paris, London, Gothenburg, but not at the same level in Dublin – yet, where even the smallest of properties, almost always apartments, increase significantly in value,” he says.
Fundamentally, he says, this migratory trend becomes a ‘political challenge’ where ‘rural survival is pitted against urban effectiveness’ and ‘value for money in that small rural schools cost more to build and maintain’.

Urban vortex
INTERESTINGLY, while Clare Island’s school, which is the subject of the case study, is typical of the historical trend, recent trends reveal ‘a challenge to the very phenomenon – the urban vortex’.
“Today, Clare Island has as many families with children in the school as there were in 1963. The school is vibrant, and the evidence is overwhelming that, contrary to a supposition of educational deprivation, the children from Clare Island school have done amazingly well,” he continues.
Clare Island is one of only four of the Irish islands in the study which experienced an increase in population between 1996 and 2011 (25 percent) and the least decrease in school enrolment (23 percent) between 1992 and 2015. It had 20 pupils enrolled in 2015, as opposed to 26 in 1992.
Co Cork’s Sherkin, on the other hand, experienced a 16 percent increase in population between 1996-2011 but a whopping 86 percent decrease in school enrolments between 1992-2015. Co Mayo’s Inishturk experienced the same dramatic decrease in enrolments (86 percent), says Dr Gill, with a 36 percent decline in its population from 1996-2011.  
The islands included in the study are Bere, Cape Clear, Sherkin (Co Cork); Tory, Árainn Mhór, Inis Meain, Inis Oirr, Inis Mór, Inishbofin (Co Galway); Inishturk, Clare Island (Mayo).