‘Let those of us who are parents make sure that we give our children wings as well as roots’

A TALE OF TWO IRELANDS Why it’s time to look forward — not back Every country tries to resist moving from a rural to an urban economy. We’re no different, but we can have a say in shaping our future, writes Conor Skehan

OVER the years, my work with the UN has taken me to some of the world’s poorer places. No matter where I go, I hear the same story in rural areas. “All of the young people are leaving our villages. A lot of the farms are abandoned now — the farmers are getting too old and there are no young people to take over. Half of the houses are empty. We have no shop or bus service any more. The place is only lively now at festivals when they all come back from the city. Why can’t it be like that all year round? Why can’t things be like they used to be?”

I hear this story in small, poor countries such as Nepal, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka — but I also hear it in the wealthy, powerful countries such as China and the US.

It’s not a common story in most of Europe anymore. It used to be — back in the 1840s when Europe’s great flight from the land occurred. The Germans even have a special word for it, “landflucht”.

It’s a normal story that usually follows a predictable plot with three acts. First, cities attract jobs and people. Second, the rural areas shrink. Third, the blame game begins — the city stole our jobs, our children, our future.

Then there is the we-must-act-to-stop-it plan. The plan to stop it lasts for about a generation. This plan is usually fuelled by emotions — the rural areas must be preserved and protected because they contain, for example, the “real” France — where they call it “patrimony”.

These plans are like loving parents who are sad and reluctant when the children spread their wings to leave the home place. The better part of us gives them our blessing and support and tries not to hold them back. Parents — and plans — that try to hold back this healthy and inevitable process use emotionally blackmailing language, such as “abandoned”, “destroyed”, and “sundered”, to describe normal change.

These plans always, always fail for the same reason that was brilliantly summed up by the poet-songwriter Paul Brady, who said that you can’t get to the future through the past.

There seem to be two Irelands — one backward-looking, nostalgic, romantic, and sometimes inward-looking. A lot of outside observers think of this as the “real” Ireland. The other is pragmatic, ambitious, world-wise and forward-looking. Each can be summoned to the surface as the need arises. Sometimes we can surprise others and ourselves — when international Ireland shows itself — as it did during the same-sex marriage referendum.

We saw ourselves clearly then; complex, contradictory — yes — but also deeply compassionate, generous and brave enough to break from the past to make hard choices about the future that we wanted.

This generosity and compassion can be our undoing, too. “One for everyone in the audience” sums it up. We want nobody left behind, nobody left out. We’re the only country in the world in which a packet of crisps is left down, open for sharing in the pub.

Our economy was ruined by the “one-for-everybody” approach of the last National Spatial Strategy — it hoped for 22 centres, each with its own big housing estates and shopping centres. Athlone, like many Midland towns, tried to give a big shopping centre to everyone who wanted one, and look at them now — closed, struggling or sold.

There’s an old joke that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We know that almost every country in the world that experiences the change from a rural economy based on agriculture to an urban one based on enterprise has tried, over and over, to resist these changes — and it has never succeeded.

We know that our last plan failed to push water uphill for the past 15 years. We can only hope that the new one will not try, over and over, to do the same thing and expect different results. Results that have never been achieved anywhere else in world.

The question then is: will the new plan repeat all of the same mistakes of the old one?

Will it promise “everything everywhere”? Will it seek to invent a Midlands city? Will it accept that rural change is normal and natural — not a decline or a tragedy?

The Government has asked the public to participate by seeking answers to 10 questions.

The last one is the best one. It asks: “What will success look like?”

Two-thirds of the content of a successful plan will be about how to make Dublin great. It’s where more than half of the population lives already and it’s where most of the country’s tax and earnings come from.

Two-thirds of a successful plan will be about keeping Ireland’s eastern economic engine at the forefront of attracting and accommodating mobile inward investment.

A successful plan will make hard choices about priorities by recognising and embracing that places have different, distinctive, but unequal potential.

A successful plan will be neither a shopping list of favoured local projects nor a cast-iron bureaucratic set of inflexible rules aiming to deliver abstract, theoretical and unjustifiable concepts and designations.

A successful plan will give priority to investment that produces the greatest economic and employment benefits — followed by cultural, social and environmental benefits — which can only be sustained by earned income.

This formula for success is the one that was set out by an expert group that was tasked with reviewing the failed National Spatial Strategy. The Government was wise to begin the process by getting this unbiased, initial appraisal.

Let’s wish the Government well with its endeavours and hope it takes this expert advice on board.

Let those of us who are parents make sure that we give our children wings as well as roots. Let’s make sure that our Government makes a plan for all of us, for the best that we can be, for who we are becoming — not who we used to be.

You, the reader, have an important role to play in this. You, too, should participate and make your views known. Go to http://npf. ie/ — especially if you are part of the majority of the population that the last plan either ignored or tried to confine; especially if you want your children to have a future as well as a past. Conor Skehan is a lecturer in planning at Dublin Institute of Technology