Grassroots action can help reverse rural decline

Any rational and objective individual would have to admit that after a number of very difficult years, there is now a real economic recovery story building in the economy.

The first-quarter growth data were pretty staggering; car sales are growing very strongly; tax revenues are showing good buoyancy, which is arguably the best possible indicator of economic activity; consumer confidence is at a nine-year high; exports are booming; construction activity is picking up, admittedly from an inordinately low base; and despite a recent stutter, the labour market is moving steadily in the right direction.

For Government it is a good news story and one that it will hope to capitalise on over the coming year. But it is not all brightness and light.

One deep and justifiable reservation that those who are interested in such matters have is that the recovery story is not geographically well spread and is very heavily focused on the Greater Dublin Area. We do not have a lot in the way of up-to-date regional or county data in this country, but the statistical evidence that we have and anecdotal evidence would strongly support the thesis that the economic recovery story is not distributed evenly around the country. For example, in the first quarter of this year, the unemployment rate averaged 9.9% for the State as a whole, but it stood at 12.8% in the South-East, 10.1% in the Mid-West, 11.6% in the West, 12.4% in the Midlands, 8.8% in Dublin, and 7.8% in the Mid-East.

At one level there is nothing terribly surprising about the imbalanced nature of the economic recovery. It was always going to be the case that the recovery would start in the capital city, where the bulk of the population lives, which has the main access points to the country and which has a very strong health and education infrastructure. I could go on, but the fact is that economic activity will generally migrate towards the centre, and one hears debates about regional economic and social decline in many countries, but particularly in the US and UK at the moment.

So while regional developments in Ireland are not unusual or unexpected, it is incumbent on policy makers and interested stakeholders to do something about it, that is of course if one accepts that it is not socially and economically desirable to allow rural and regional areas become denuded of economic activity and population, particularly the young population. Not everybody does, of course.

With an election imminent and with rural votes up for grabs, the political parties have suddenly started to focus. They should realise that policies such as totally inadequate investment in infrastructure, the downgrading of hospitals, the closure of garda stations, and the closure of post offices are all contributing to the decline of rural Ireland. It is also an incontrovertible fact that planning decisions around the country which have allowed out-of-town supermarket development with free parking have utterly decimated towns around the country. Why would anybody pay parking fees to a switched-off local authority that insists on inappropriate commercial rates and parking fees when they can go out of town and get free parking?

It does not take a genius to figure out that planning policies have contributed hugely to the decimation of many towns. The same experience has been seen in the US and UK, but at least in those jurisdictions there is an attempt to do something to reverse the trend. Not so here in Ireland.

Policy makers need to look at issues such as planning, commercial rates, parking, and IT infrastructure to arrest the decline of towns. However, it is far more important that local communities stand up and create a united front to turn the tide. We are increasingly seeing many local communities doing it themselves as they have tired of the plentiful official rhetoric and lack of real action. It is a struggle, but it is a battle well worth fighting.