Cromwell, the west and the future

ALL TALK? Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking in Westport Town Hall in 2018 at a forum entitled Creating Stronger Rural Economies and Communities. However, Dr John Bradley argues that Government plans like Project Ireland 2040 do not come even close to what is needed to really ignite balanced regional development. Pic: Maxwells

Dr John Bradley

The distorted distribution of cabinet seats in the new government generated anger in the counties west of the Shannon. The ghost of Oliver Cromwell has been invoked. But the Dublin view is that this reaction is history-denying, inward looking parochialism. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter set out this case in the Irish Times on Friday last (‘Western People overplays victim card’).
Leaving aside the more emotive and personal objections to the composition of the government, the anger in the West goes to the heart of our political system. Our national governance system is among the most centralised in the EU. In Ireland, centralisation is used politically as a way of avoiding having to face the challenges generated by competing localisms. It is much neater to run things from the centre.
Representation in US Congress (as in our DΡil) is proportional to population but each US State also has two Senators, irrespective of its population. We in Ireland have no such balancing institutional arrangement to serve as a guarantor of regional fairness. Consequently, when it comes to exercising power, an Irish region naturally feels that it must have a strong presence in Cabinet. Is it any surprise that a Cabinet with no voting member from west of the Shannon caused dismay?
Even when there is a regional presence in Cabinet, the shift of population towards the Dublin metropolitan area, and to a lesser extent to Cork, means that power has moved decisively to these cities. This shift drives the manner in which regional development planning is now handled.
For example, the central message of Project Ireland 2040 is that there are five dynamic metropolitan areas in Ireland, clustered about Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford, where most of the economic action in our country takes place. The rest of the country is treated as a rather static, under-populated, rural poor relation, whose existence is acknowledged but which in deemed incapable of robust, self-sustaining development.
Using sophisticated public relations, such stark views are never asserted so nakedly. Comforting words are used to persuade us that the centre really cares about the regions. And a general failure of western politicians of all parties to co-operate and build a case for more radical approaches to regional development makes it all too easy for the centralising vision to drive out alternatives. Since they will not hang together, they hang separately.
If this distortion is to be reversed we urgently need to move away from personality and county-based politics and explore the origins of the east-west development imbalances and possible solutions. When and how did they originate? Were there opportunities in the past to redirect economic development in a different and more spatially equitable direction? Were these opportunities seized? If not, why not?

History repeating
The Cromwellian ghost still stalks the land. The Plantation of the mid-17th century initiated and formalised the political and economic peripherality of Connaught. The gradual improvement in transport infrastructure on the island – roads, ports and towards the end of the 18th century, canals – largely bypassed Connaught and much of the rest of the Atlantic coast. The infrastructure deficit was massive and this constrained the emergence and growth of towns that could act as incubators of the modernisation and development that would arrive in the 19th century.
The first systematic efforts to improve road and harbour infrastructure in Connaught took place under the guidance of the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo. But resources were modest and left Connaught on a trajectory of underdevelopment that became devastating with the onset of the Great Famine.
What Nimmo initiated for roads and harbours William Dargan and others initiated for rail. While these rail links might have prospered in a region that had strong and growing towns and cities, they had less success in Connaught with its dispersed small towns and its post-Famine imploding population. Towards the end of the 19th century a modest kind of integrated regional development did emerge with the Congested Districts Board (CDB). But this initiative was abandoned in the early years of independence and responsibility spread across many different government departments who continue to kick regional strategy into the long grass.
In Mayo hopeful initiatives are being undertaken by the County Council. Mayo 2040, An Economic Strategy for County Mayo, is the very first effort to take a serious look at regional development opportunities from an informed and integrated county perspective. For the first time it may be possible to break out of our restrictive Cromwellian legacy. Local councillors and TDs from all Western counties need to participate in these kinds of initiatives. Collaboratively they could make a real difference. In isolation they are weak and the agenda will continue to be driven by the big urban centres.

Murrisk-based Dr John Bradley is a former Research Professor at the ESRI, thereafter he has been an international research consultant in economic development.