An Post closures add frightening chapter to a tale of two Irelands

IT IS 50 years since John Healy’s ‘Death of an Irish Town’ was published. The author wrote poignantly of how he saw the life drain from Charlestown, Co Mayo. The busiest place in the area was the train station where tear-soaked handkerchiefs were waved from carriage windows. This week, there was good news on the emigration front in that the number of Irish people coming home has outstripped the number leaving for the first time in a decade. There was further positivity with the announcement there are now 20,000 more people in employment than before the crash.

This is encouraging. It represents real progress, but the sense of achievement is dimmed by the fact that evidence of an ever-deepening urban/rural divide – a tale of two Irelands – is becoming a frightening new reality.

Towns have a dormitory feel as locals leave for the cities to work. Students are commuting for hours to go to universities as they cannot afford to pay exorbitant rents.

The white-washed window is commonplace as local businesses padlock doors. The energy is being sucked out of villages as vital services are cut off. In the past 25 years, some 777 post offices have closed around the country.

Yesterday it was revealed 159 more will shut as part of a restructuring plan. That means pensioners will have to travel long distances to do essential tasks for daily living.

In recent years, 139 Garda stations – most of them in rural areas – also closed, leaving people feeling isolated and unprotected. Pubs have also shut up shop at the rate of more than two a week for the past 12 years. Figures from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland show there were 1,477 fewer pubs in Ireland last year than in 2005, a 17.1pc drop.

In July of this year, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said there “isn’t a pot of money” from Europe to develop rural transport projects. Nobody expects a pot, but a fair share would ease the sense of abandonment many in rural Ireland feel as they are left in the slipstream of progress by an ever more centralised Government.

WHILE average broadband speed increased by more than 30pc in cosmopolitan areas, there is no such joy beyond the Pale. This makes it extremely difficult to run a business if you live outside of a major city or town. Again, commercial broadband services in cities and large towns have improved but the Government’s plan to fix poor-quality services in rural areas seems to have hit a brick wall. Work on the State-subsidised National Broadband Plan was supposed to begin at the start of this year but it has been pushed back to next.

Poor and patchy internet access is your lot if you live out in the country.

Independent postmasters have appealed to the Government to respect a vote in the Dáil to have no closures for five years, but they won’t hold their breath.

An Post boss David McRedmond defends the mass closures to save An Post, but where is the Government plan to defend rural Ireland?

Terry Keenan, vice chair of the Irish Local Development network, didn’t mince his words on RTÉ radio: “It seems to be an attack on rural Ireland, it seems that people no longer matter, there’s no empathy with people, that it is all about facts and figures, a numbers game, numbers crunching.”

Let’s remember we are a society, spun from a number of small communities, not a soulless economy.

Social cohesion is essential. If commercial imperatives are the primary drivers of ‘progress’, we can only sit back and watch community life be displaced. An alignment of political power with wealth, concentrated in exclusive areas and indifferent to the plight of others, will inevitably have a suffocating effect on rural life .