Aiming to get back on track

CHARLESTOWN in East Mayo is quiet but alive some 35 years after journalist John Healy wrote about its death.

Healy's best-selling book, "Death of an Irish Town" highlighted how a lack of State investment in the west desolated small towns leaving only corpses.

"I couldn't go down the town for six months after that was written. My friend I was best man at his wedding didn't speak to me for eight years. I was never able to let my mother see that book either," Healy's brother Gerry remembers.

Shortly after 6pm on a Monday, the only signs of life are students from the convent school waiting for a lift home and some passing cars. The Magic Wok Chinese restaurant shines brightest in the town square after dark.

The weeds are piled high with other debris down at the town's once buzzing railway station, where FÁS workers have started a clean-up. Only a handful of customers are inside the scattering of pubs in the Square.

This is rural Ireland today, modern houses, grey streets, empty pubs, workers commuting from larger towns before settling in to watch TV for the night.

Charlestown is one of the towns the National Spatial Strategy forgot.

It's in the second division of urban centres and faces uncertain future. n many ways, the health of Charlestown is still a barometer for all small towns nationwide, just as it was in 1967 when Healy first published his work.

Just 25 miles from Castlebar and Sligo and 56 miles from Galway, Charlestown has dozens of workers who commute to bigger towns nearby.

Knock International Airport, where there is a daily flight to Dublin is also just three miles away but many believe the town hasn't benefited since it opened in the 1980's.

However, despite the economic doom and gloom, there are signs of recovery. There's a top class football field and sports hall and there are proposals to develop a gym and sauna.

Four new estates are planned and more than 200 houses will be constructed in the next two years. Property prices in the area range from €120,000 for a three bedroom house to €150,000 to €160,000 for a four-bedroom home.

Over the last five years in excess of 100 houses have been built on the Swinford road into the town. When the census figures are released later this year it should show around 800 people live in Charlestown the highest level in 20 years.

In December, Mayo County Council agreed to develop an arts centre and library. The centre will be built at the site of the old town hall on Barrack Street.

"There was some great musicals there in the 1950's and 60's but there isn't as many involved that kind of thing around here anymore," said Tom Jordan, whose father was one of the first gardaí appointed in the town.

But while there are signs of growth, there is also fear.

Stephen Healy, trainer of GAA team Charlestown Sarsfields, is cautious about the future.

"There should be a certain amount of investment held back for all these towns. There's still a large amount of people out there who would come back if they had a guarantee of a job and a decent living.

"If there's a serious downturn who knows what will happen. Towns are on a knife edge and it could go either way. We don't have someone pushing our case at the top table," says Stephen, who is John Healy's nephew.

But while Charlestown may have missed out on many of the benefits of the Celtic Tiger, problems that once had a distinctly urban ring to them have arrived in the west including teenage pregnancies, drugs, and well founded fears about date-rape drugs.

"There are drugs in towns like this, just like the cities. People don't think these things exist in rural Ireland," shop worker Siobhán Bierne, 32, said.

Father of four Simon Craig, 33, who has a daughter and three sons aged between 12 and three years, believes there should be posters in the pubs about the dangers of Rohypnol.

"The more young people can be informed about these things the better," he said.

There's local concern about health and the lack of cancer treatment services in Castlebar General Hospital.

"There's so much that you can't be treated for in Castlebar. When people get very badly injured they should be moved to Dublin but we've no emergency helicopter to get them there.

"We pay the same taxes as people in Dublin but don't get the same services," said Mr Craig.

Employment is not as difficult to get as it was when Healy first penned his work. Window and door manufacturers, TJ Grady Ltd even had to recruit people from outside the country when they advertised 70 new jobs at their Charlestown factory in 1999.

Some 11 workers from the Czech Republic still work at the plant that employs 200. While there are employment opportunities in the region, there are not too many families unaffected by emigration.

In New York at the moment there's about 40 people in the 20-40 age group from Charlestown. The vast majority left in the 1980's and early 90's.

"I did my Leaving Cert in 1987 and out of a class of 54 there's only about four of us around, all the rest are in Dublin or they've emigrated," said Stephen Healy whose brother Conor, 28, has lived in New York for the last 10 years.

Stephen Healy got his primary teaching degree in 2000 in Dublin and decided to come home and teach in Gortaganny school, 15 miles away in Co Roscommon.

"Not everybody wants to come back to their home town. I had the option to come back and I was delighted to do so. It's a fairly secure place there's no crime of any description. A good place to bring up kids. It has a wit and a charm of its own.

"People know your business and you haven't much of a private life. If you can get over that, and I don't think it's a very big issue, it's is a great place to live."

An active community is the key to Charlestown's survival but already there are indications that new arrivals are not getting involved locally, Stephen said.

"If you're not in some organisation then you don't have an awful lot of options. I was talking to an elderly man and he said he wouldn't know a lot of people who have moved into the town recently. That's sad but it's better than having empty houses."

Stephen became trainer of Charlestown Sarsfields in 2001 and steered the team to the semi-final of the All-Ireland football club championship, where they were defeated by Nemo Rangers in Nenagh last March.

It had been almost a century since the club had even won the county final.

"The biggest thing about the win was the exposure the place received. This was more than a club success, it was a town success, we had people coming home from London, Chicago, New York and London. That weekend in Nenagh was a special type of reunion."

There's no doubt that these are good days to live in Charlestown but the numbers leaving are still far greater than the tally of returned exiles. Gerry Healy believes his brother's work helped save the town and places like it.

"They couldn't see the light here at the time, they saw it afterwards. John was saying to the Government, it's time you did something for the West."

These days, the signs of hope are clearly evident in East Mayo even if the bad old days still hover around this place. There are positive indicators, like the large number of buses that leave the town square on Sunday evenings to take local third level students to Sligo, Letterkenny, Athlone, Galway and Dublin.

In 1967, these teenagers would be bound for Britain or the US to work in unskilled jobs.

Stephen Healy reckons only 10% will return home to live because there's no employment for computer, engineering and science graduates locally. It's better than 1967 though. Charlestown's future is unclear but Gerry Healy believes talk of a dying town can be cast aside.

"The biggest change is that there's nobody emigrating to England now. That was the big thing in John's day. The Government didn't do anything for them that time, all that was there for them was the boat. There's a few people going now, but only a few thank God," he said.