Planning Mayo’s Future

PLANNING PYRAMID The Castlebar Local Area Planning strategy, as visually asserted by Mayo County Council. Pic: MCC

The fall out from overly centralised, top-down governance


John Bradley

Mayo County Council’s recent unveiling of the draft Local Area Plan (LAP) for Castlebar provides a useful opportunity for public examination and consultation.
Every County Council is obliged to draw up rolling medium-term planning and development frameworks at county and town levels, under tight national guidelines set out in Project Ireland 2040 and the relevant Regional Spatial and Economic Strategy.
The Mayo County Development Plan (MCDP) covering the years 2022 to 2028 was approved last year. Now it is the turn of the more narrowly focused 2023-2029 plan for Castlebar, the administrative capital of the county, with brief treatment of other Mayo towns.
In most EU states such planning exercises start with towns and villages. They then work up to a county-level perspective, advance further to a regional level (in our case, the eight-county Northern & Western Region), and finally consolidate into a genuine national plan that embraces the best of local knowledge and regional and national synergies. The Castlebar LAP exercise is visually asserted by the Council to be a pyramid of accumulated knowledge.
However, the reality is that Irish planning processes are heavily top-down, starting at the national level, not the local level. They then move down to the level of three ‘super-regions’, where Mayo is part of the N&W Region, embracing the eight counties. But instructions and restrictions come from the very top and not from the regions, counties or towns.
Many issues treated in Mayo county and local area plans are not even under the jurisdiction of the Council. Examples include planning of roads, the restoration of the rail link from Athenry through Mayo to Sligo, and, more seriously, an inability to innovate on urban connectivity within the county. To visualise the real process, turn the MCC planning pyramid upside-down!

Dysfunctional
A good case can be made for ensuring that local plans and aspirations are reasonably consistent with regional or national perspectives. Absent such consistency and chaos reigns. But the heavily centralised governance system used in Ireland inevitably leads to poor use of local information and expertise, flawed and inconsistent decision making and neglect of the special needs of under-developed counties in the N&W Region.
This kind of centralised governance also serves to deflect local debate into scattered and often ineffectual treatment of problems as they crop up, often leading to trivial and embarrassing squabbles and name calling between the elected councillors and the county executive. Local government has been so dysfunctional for so long that we have come to believe that it can never be reformed.
One of the causes of our rotten system of regional development planning can be traced right back to Project Ireland 2040, with its heavy focus on the dominant role of the ‘five cities’ (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford). The N&W Region found itself in the unusual situation where, with the exception of Galway in the extreme south of the region, it contained no cities or large towns. Castlebar, Mayo’s largest, is ranked 59th by size in Ireland.
So the N&W Regional Assembly selected Letterkenny, Sligo and Athlone, the three largest towns in our region (populations in the region of 20,000), as substitutes for missing cities.
Castlebar, with a population of not much more than half that of Letterkenny or Sligo, was grudgingly assigned a token place in the third division of the N&W region.
But here’s a curious thing. The population of many of the modestly sized Mayo towns has been growing dramatically between 1991 and 2016 (for example, Castlebar by 56 percent, Ballinrobe by 127 percent), while Sligo grew only modestly (6.9 percent).
This small-town dynamism in Mayo characterises the centre and south of the county. The picture in the county’s north is less rosy (Ballina, 24 percent; Crossmolia, -13 percent). But there is something happening that falls outside of the national ‘five cities’ model and requires an approach to development focused as much on improving the interactions between small towns as the interactions going on within individual towns.
Analysis of travel to work areas in Mayo suggests that urban dynamism comes from the interaction of its many small towns and not just from their isolated characteristics. The commute by car from (say) Westport to Kiltimagh (41km) takes far less time that the commute from Bray to Dublin (22km). The national planners, obsessed with the five large metropolitan areas, are blind to the development dynamic emerging within the cluster of the 12 Mayo towns with a population of more than 1,000 as well as smaller towns, such as Balla, Knock, Newport and others.

Vital links
This is where the role of the Western Rail Corridor comes in. It is to the credit of Mayo County Council that they have staunchly defended the currently disused track as it crosses the county from Athenry to Collooney.
The gradual improvement of the north-south road system in Mayo, together with the restoration of a north-south rail service, will be vital elements of linking Mayo’s small but dynamic towns, help revitalise the northern towns and break away from the deadening clutches of the ‘five cities’ model and dependence on crumbs from the top-down table. The essential development weakness in Mayo is on the North-South axis, not the East-West!
Castlebar has a bright future, but only within a constellation of dynamic and interacting Mayo towns. These Mayo towns need to hang together, or they will hang separately. MCC needs to revise its county and town plans to articulate better that kind of development model rather than continue to work with a nationally dictated development model that is inappropriate for our county.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.