We are robbing communities of hope – and that is a dangerous thing to do

WHAT’S the opposite of regeneration?

It could be degeneration.

Or it could be despair.

It could be a code word for all the broken promises of recent years, all the failed policy and ideology.

The news that the regeneration of vulnerable Limerick communities will not, after all, be affordable comes as a terrible blow. Not just to the people who live in those communities, the women rearing children, the teenagers with a very limited future, the men with no jobs. Not just to all the people who have worked to bring regeneration about.

It is also a terrible blow, of the kind that strikes fear into the heart, to other communities around Ireland who are waiting for the hope that regeneration brings.

Regeneration isn’t just about rebuilding houses. It is also a way of fixing the mistakes of the past.

The reason regeneration is necessary is because not that long ago, it was public policy to organise communities of local authority housing in such a way as to build long-term problems into them.

They were built, essentially, as rows of houses, perhaps with some green space, but with little or nothing in the way of amenities for growth and development. They were designed very often with only one way in and the same way out, a long way from the town centre of which they were part.

They looked like ghettoes from the start, blocked off from the rest of the world, and they frequently developed into ghettoes that people didn’t want to visit.

The people who went to live in those communities – in Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Galway, and all over Dublin – were people who aspired to a better life. A house or flat of their own, somewhere for the kids to play. They often moved away from their own neighbourhoods – and family and friends – to move in to the new surroundings. Loneliness wasn’t long setting in, and it was compounded by isolation.

Little by little, many of these communities became places where, if you were settled with a job and prospects, you wanted to leave. Vacancies were filled by more vulnerable people. Drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, all began to encroach.

In the 1970s and ’80s, you only had to mention Fatima Mansions, for example, and it immediately conjured up a vision of drugs, violence, vigilantism and anti-social behaviour. It was a place that everyone wanted to leave – and indeed, anyone who could afford to do so left as soon as they could.

Fatima was hell for the people left behind, and a byword for poverty, deprivation and neglect. And it became a vicious circle – if your address was Fatima Mansions your chances of getting a job were zero, and your chance of getting an education not much better. Fatima Mansions was notorious throughout Ireland .

Now, as a direct result of regeneration, Fatima is a potentially wonderful place to live and an inspiring place to visit. Most of the community that lived there in the bad old days are still there, and they have been joined by young professionals and by families who are attracted to its style and its amenities.

It shows what can be done. But regeneration, in Limerick and probably elsewhere, is no longer described as affordable. It’s an interesting word that, because it doesn’t actually mean what it says. When we’re told that regeneration is no longer affordable, we’re really being told that it has slipped down the priority list. In the eyes of policy makers, it simply doesn’t matter as much as it did.

Or perhaps it was easier once, and harder now. In the days when property values soared through the roof, it was much easier to construct public private partnerships – a model that essentially offered developers the chance to make a great deal of money from the mix of private and public housing that could be accommodated on a publicly-owned site.

The model was so easy, and so attractive, that governments decided that regeneration could not just be done on the cheap, it could be done free. So local authorities, especially in Dublin, were told that they could undertake whatever regeneration they needed to, but couldn’t make any claim on the public purse. It would be up to the local authorities themselves to negotiate whatever they could from the developers, to fund not only the new houses but also social and educational programmes.

But the model was always doomed to fail, for several reasons. If it is to deliver the promise it holds out, regeneration must recognise the reality that faces vulnerable communities. It doesn’t actually start with the houses – it starts with the kids. Communities that simply have old houses replaced with new ones end up needing to be regenerated again 20 years later. Regeneration that is centred on the needs of families, and especially on the notion that this is about a decent start in life for the children of the neighbourhood, will produce long-term results.

If you visit Fatima, for example, you can see the real hope for the whole place in the fantastic crèche there, run to high standards and populated by some of the happiest kids in Dublin. So you can’t build and sustain a model like that on the back of the hope that property prices will go on rising, and that it will be worth a builder’s while to mix up the housing. It takes a much more rounded and long-term view. You can see that rounded view in the master plan that Brendan Kenny and his team are creating for Limerick, and if it’s not given the priority it needs, it’s only storing up trouble for the future.

What we’ve really had so far is a national policy on urban regeneration without national accountability. There’s no point in blaming the Minister for Defence, for example, for the collapse of policy in Limerick – he is only centrally involved because he’s the local TD, after all. When you look around, and try to find out who is really accountable for delivering regeneration (in its full, rounded sense) you discover that there is nobody.

In Dublin, Limerick, and elsewhere, there are communities in danger of crumbling into destruction. The worst and most damaging thing that can happen to those communities is to rob them of hope. And hope is not a bland concept – the studies exist that demonstrate all too clearly that the big barrier to the proper development of a child can be a sense of hopelessness in the family and the community around him or her.

Hopelessness is a step on the way to alienation. Alienation – the distrust of all forms of authority – is a key ingredient in anti-social behaviour, in crime and lawlessness, and in the descent into a destructive cycle that can pass from one generation to the next. If you rob already vulnerable communities of hope for the future, you’re lighting a fuse that will certainly lead to further explosions.

Everyone knows the communities at risk throughout Ireland. Everyone involved in public policy knows what needs to be done.

Nobody wants to take individual responsibility. The day we decide that regeneration is unaffordable, that’s the day we decide that these communities are dispensable.