Rural Action Plan: New answers needed for old problems
Just like America’s Rust Belt, the future for rural Ireland can’t be a new, shiny, the-jobs-are-back version of the past. Things have changed permanently and new solutions to old problems are needed.
The jobs section in the action plan has a budget of €50m, €1.92m for each county. That might build one or two small schools or paint a few community halls but not much more.
To put the €50m in a real-world context, last Friday’s Washington jamboree cost something a little shy of €190m. TG4, which attracts 2% of the TV audience, will get €32.79m in Government subsidies this year.
Yesterday’s plan is one of many intended to support rural communities, jobs, or heritage. Everything from the Common Agricultural Policy to Leader programmes, from supports for medical practices to aid for public transport, exist to keep the wolf from the door.
Despite all of these interventions rural Ireland and rural Europe are in a decline that needs more than crumbs-from-the-table measures to turn the tide.
The drivers of rural decline in Europe are falling fertility rates and falling birth rates. Jobs shortages and, in areas that attract tourists or retired people, a dearth of affordable housing conspire to drive young people to cities.
In time, services close, leaving a dependent population to fend for itself. Farm automation destroys work just as effectively as automation on the factory floor.
Communities from the Beara Peninsula to the wellspring of la France profonde, from the hills dividing Spain and Portugal, from the marginal farms of Poland or Slovakia to desolated Greece, are hemorrhaging their life blood — the next generation. A steady, almost unremarked shift is taking place.
European Commission figures suggest that up to 22% of people in rural France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are elderly, while only about 10% of EU farmers are 35 or younger. Take the train from Cork to Dublin and stretchs of neglected, all but abandoned farmland — or, rewilded in today’s terminology — show that hollowing out at work.
To rub salt into that wound, relatively affluent Europeans move to poorer, rural parts of southern Europe when they retire.
Portugal’s University of Coimbra published a report that found that rich, sun-seeking immigrants had saved rural communities along the Spain-Portugal border from extinction. We do not have plentiful sun so that option is not available.
Core rural enterprises — meat and milk — are questioned like never before so alternatives must be considered.
This is a huge problem but there is one thing we can do much more quickly than we are. Broadband speeds in some rural areas are up to 36 times slower than those in cities. This effectively means that modern business cannot be conducted in or from those areas.
Lifting that technical border dividing today’s real world seems something pretty close to a last best chance. Broadband is mentioned in the plan but so is the suggestion that €50m might help create 135,000 jobs over three years — a claim straight out of the alternative facts playbook.
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