Devoured daily by metropolitan sprawl
Another world exclusive truth here today, in relation to our DNA, which is all the buzz just now after researchers recently announced the first Irishmen were black of skin and blue of eyes and, by most accounts, as thick as the wall, in order to survive on a dangerous island.
How much has changed since?
I’ve done my own research for all of you, with regard to the modern DNA situation in Ireland, and the results are very stark indeed. Again, the pure and frightening truth.
It emerges DNA in Ireland is different to DNA anywhere else. I discover that DNA in the Irish context is shorthand for Dublin’s Nauseating Attitude towards those of us who still manage to eke out some kind of living in what is left of the long lonesome stretches of rural Ireland.
In blunt language, with the assistance of successive Governments, Dublin is now in the final stages of sucking all the life and youth and energy out of the provinces.
It is now truly, and sadly Greater Dublin. Because our younger generations have to head there for economic and social survival as soon as they are old enough to fly the home nest. The jobs and opportunities have all been grabbed for the past decade and more by Dublin and Dubliners.
They are gleefully bleeding us dry, and laughing all the way to the bank.
History has been turned on its head, because it is those of us who battle to survive in rural Ireland who reside in the new Pale.
Quite shocking, is it not?
Just one sporting reality hallmarks the situation.
Even before Easter brings on the GAA championship, we know for sure the Dublin footballers will win Sam Maguire again next autumn. This is largely because most of the red blood in the veins of the star players in blue has been filched from the provinces. The majority of them sprang from country boys and girls who, in their youth, had to leave their rural homes, and local unemployment, to find jobs in Dublin.
Meanwhile former kingpins like Kerry, Cork and Galway, weakened through the loss of so much new blood to the banks of the Liffey, are struggling annually to even win provincial titles.
Cute Enda Kenny of Mayo, the outgoing father of the Dail, announced this week that he was retiring and would not fight the next election.
He probably cannot bear the burden of seeing Mayo’s surviving footballers beaten by a Dublin point next August.
Another pure enough truth.
Provincial cities like Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford have some chance of tempering the worst effects of the insidious DNA, but one has only to drive through the increasingly depopulated smaller towns and villages of our new pallid Pale to observe the damage done already.
For me, a very significant indicator is the number of closed and rusting petrol pumps in village after village.
The vehicles of the rising generation who are employed are now daily trapped in Dublin’s traffic jams.
Often, too, the shops that once operated the pumps are closed down with forlorn “For Sale” signs over their doors.
The footfall is all one-way, eastwards, as things stand.
In our rurality, with its aging farming population, an associated stress is the clampdown on driving laws. We need our wheels critically more urgently than city folk. We cannot afford to lose our licenses because we drank a pint of porter at the wrong time on the wrong night or, worse still, had to drive somewhere on the morning after the night before in the local.
Nobody can forgive flagrant drink driving, for sure, but the enforced isolation imposed on rural dwellers by motoring regulations has many negative consequences too, including, some argue, a rising rural suicide rate, especially amongst lone farmers who might not speak with other humans for entire days on end, because of their occupation. You and I can both attach some names and dates to the cold statistics.
Greater Dublin, as they call it, has already substantially weakened the identities of counties such as Kildare, Wicklow and Meath.
We hardly have 26 individual, proud counties any more. They are devoured daily and weekly by metropolitan sprawl. Where is that process heading, in the immediate future? I don’t know the answer.
Meanwhile, secondary roads just about everywhere in the provinces are in a dreadful state, worsened by Storm Emma, at a time when big motorways seem designed to speed up enforced emigration to Dublin.
We all know too well that monthly rent rates in small Dublin apartments for incoming provincials are higher than the mortgages attached to fine spacious homes in the new Pale outside Dublin.
So many of these fine homes remain unsold, because of the lack of local employment and opportunities.
It is depressingly sad.
I regret that the research into our DNA situation is so gloomy.
I will try and have a brighter story next week.
Happy Easter in the meantime to you all.
