Sustaining rural communities - We can’t let rural Ireland fade away
For communities, especially coastal communities who enjoy a summer influx of visitors and the business they bring, the signs of a turning season mark the end of the, hopefully, busy time of the year and bring a day of reckoning.
Has the short summer season generated enough business to help support the community through a long and quiet winter?
Other rural communities, those without a pier, a golf course, a beach, a trout lake or river, or even a small factory, are not so lucky.
They depend on what the local economy can generate but must face their day of reckoning without annual harvest, however meagre, tourism brings.
By now the narrative of rural decline is well rehearsed and entirely predictable. Disproportionate levels of poverty and unemployment.
Post offices, garda stations and banks closing. Stuttering, unreliable broadband hinders business developement and job creation.
Infrastructure frays at the edges because routine maintenance has become far, far less than routine.
Ever stricter planning regulations, in comparison to the bungalow bliss free-for-all of the past, at least, means it’s more difficult to put down roots in country communities than it once may have been.
Even medical and veterinary services are becoming difficult to sustain in some areas.
Some schools have been closed and ever-more dilapidated pubs, once the social heart of many communities, seem almost mocking gravestones on ever quieter main streets.
It may just be possible that heritage or social welfare organisations may have to step in, as they do in other parts of Europe, to save the local pub because they have seen the unattractive social cost of living in a village without a pub and the interaction and sense of community it fosters.
There can hardly be a more apt, a more telling, metaphor for the hollowing out of rural Ireland than the suggestion that water from the Shannon catchment be piped to an ever-thirstier greater Dublin and east coast, where water loss through leaking pipes is estimated at something around 50%.
This annexation of resources will strengthen the economic imbalance dividing this country and may make it even more difficult to attract development to the west.
It seems likely though that this proposal will come to fruition but it must be matched by investment in the west, maybe by imposing a levy on the end users of the Shannon water.
Things are not as bad as they might be, though.
It is just possible that a lot of the less productive areas, in a material sense at least, of rural Ireland would have been carpeted in coniferous forest but for European Union intervention and support through the admirable Leader programme of two decades ago.
Initiatives such as these show that rural Ireland has the enthusiasm and spirit needed to survive and grow even in an ever more urbanised world and relatively modest investment could be the catalyst for sustaining communities and a culture that have weathered many a storm.
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