Rural decisions fail to consider social costs

ASK any member of the Dáil if there is an animus against rural Ireland and they will look at you askance.

But ask anyone trying to raise their family outside of a major city and you may get a different answer. It is not deliberate, and nor is it strategic, but one announcement after the next seems inimical to the business of living in the country.

A few weeks ago, a leading bank announced it was closing hundreds of branches, now comes the bombshell that 400 post offices are to be axed.

Add to this the ending of some bus and rail routes, and you do begin to believe that the rural/urban divide is no longer a by-product of over-active imagination.

It is worth repeating that there has been no actual decision to make life more difficult for those in the country, but slowly and surely one blow has followed another, leaving too many villages and small towns reeling.

Yes, time moves on. Not every town needs half a dozen post offices or their own bank; but if all decision-taking is made purely on economic grounds without due regard to the social costs, the quality of people’s lives will suffer.

John B Keane and John McGahern were both masterful observers of country life. In each village, there was a hierarchy: the doctor, the parish priest, the bank manager, the post office keeper...

Were either of these gifted authors about today, they would struggle to people the pages of their celebrated works. One government is no more to blame than the next.

The pace of “progress”, if such a word can be applied in the context of the decimation of large chunks of rural Ireland, does not pause long enough for debate.

All the same, many of these villages dying on their feet because of the exodus of those looking for work in the cities are replete with houses that could be part of the solution to the housing crisis – if there was a national plan, that is. But this requires a national vision. In the interests of “efficiencies”, more services and institutions will die a slow death.

The words of Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ come to mind: Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.