Can TDs save rural Ireland?
Only if they want to...
THE latest in the seemingly unending line of harassed Sinn Féin female politicians recently alleged an assault at Naomh Fionnbarra GAA club in Cabra in March, 2016. It brought to mind a visit to the club many years ago. A friend had bought a house in Cabra, and after a few drinks there, a group of us headed out for a pint. I suggested Naomh Fionnbarra, where a contact of mine, the Sinn Féin councillor and notorious terrorist Nicky Kehoe, was a team manager. My rather dishevelled group of eight were stopped at the door, but I told them Nicky was a pal, and he was duly summoned. We ordered eight pints. The barman dropped them down and said ‘they’re on Nicky’ and nodded to a balcony, from where the councillor waved regally. The evening ended with a concerned punter sidling up to me at the urinals; ‘you’d want to be careful with who you’re hanging around with’. Nicky came close to taking a Dáil seat in 2002 but the Sinn Féin politburo told him he must step back for a new star – Mary Lou McDonald. She was eventually elected in 2011 and look at her now. Nicky can still be found at Naomh Fionnbarra.
Crises in health and housing crop up with such increasing regularity that you could be forgiven for thinking that government is impotent. It is not. It just chooses to be.
In 1996, the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin horrified the nation. Criminals were so out of control, they murdered a middleclass mother of one.
The Fine Gael-led Rainbow government felt the outrage burning throughout the country. It had to act. John Bruton’s government set up the Criminal Assets Bureau, beefed up the Garda Síochána and mobilised the Special Criminal Court to try gangsters.
In Limerick in 2008, Shane Geoghegan was gunned down in a case of mistaken identity.
More than 200 gardaí were dedicated to investigating gangland and the draconian Criminal Justice Bill 2009 came into force. People were outraged and the State was threatened. In time, the criminals were crushed, albeit temporarily.
But can the Government pull out the stops in the same way to ‘save’ rural Ireland?
Last Monday, the Cabinet met to discuss the National Planning Framework (NPF) 2040, which sets a structure for planning and infrastructure decisions over the next 20 years. Tipperary Labour TD Alan Kelly says the plan will ‘kill rural Ireland’.
The Irish Farmers’ Association’s Thomas Cooney described the framework as ‘Dublin-centric and lacking ambition for rural Ireland’. What most disturbs the critics of the document is that it will define towns for major investment as those with a population of more than 10,000.
The plan for everywhere else? Just carry on as before.
What should really disturb those living in rural Ireland is that this was the sanitised document. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the plan had been ‘substantially redrafted’ after extensive lobbying from rural politicians.
‘When I hear people talking about turning every town into a city and every village into a town, railways to everywhere, that would not be viable and would require a massive subvention to our health budget and education budget,’ he said. ‘So it needs to be realistic.’
Rural Ireland will come after the health service and education. Other vital projects for cities are jumping the queue. In tandem with the NPF will come the publication of the National Development Plan (NDP), which will list major infrastructure building programmes.
So far, Government sources tell me that NDP projects include a second runway at Dublin Airport, the building of the M20 motorway to connect Cork and Limerick and the expansion of the Dart. Perhaps even a metro, which has been announced every few years for two decades. A lot of it is the product of a fertile civil service imagination, but that imagination doesn’t even bother with rural Ireland.
But how exactly do you solve a problem like rural Ireland?
Politicians and community leaders often pick the wrong battles: some stubbornly insist on the maintenance of eye-wateringly expensive train services nobody will ever use, others want people in remote areas to be let drink and drive.
But here’s one 21st-century essential that could have been provided to rural Ireland expeditiously and at a relatively cheap cost to the State: rural broadband.
If the Government wanted to send a message that it truly wanted people to live and work in the countryside, this would have been it. Broadband allows people to work for multinationals, media organisations and many, many other industries from home, any home. People could have run businesses with broadband. Kids could do their homework, students could follow online courses. The National Broadband Plan, they say, was thrown into chaos when Eir withdrew from the tender process.
That left one bidder, Enet, after another firm withdrew last year. Rather than leap into action, the Dáil returned to the comfort of familiarity: it squabbled.
Put simply, the Irish establishment and a Government led by the civil service just doesn’t want us to live in the countryside. If they were honest about it, there might be a short-term backlash, but at least families and businesses in rural Ireland could prepare to move out. In fairness to Mr Varadkar and his Government, they have gone a long way towards admitting this – with the Taoiseach’s aforementioned Dáil statement, and two plans that all but ignore rural areas. Still, Mayo Minister Michael Ring and other Government TDs are allowed play the tiresome game of pretending there are good times around the corner. To keep the votes.
But the Government is just mirroring what is a global trend.
Across the world, the rural–urban divide is widening. Cities attract the lion’s share of government funding, private investment and even research. In 1960, 54% of us lived in rural Ireland, now its 36%.
The prestigious Nature scientific magazine recently gathered contributions of international academics to put together a four-point plan to revive the global rural landscape.
Some governments, including those in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Spain, have used planning, investment and subsidy strategies to encourage rural development.
Almost a decade ago, the Fianna Fáil government promised to rollout broadband in 10 months. But despite the fragmented Dáil, there is one man who still has power to reform, Mr Varadkar himself. He must set out a strategy for rural Ireland, for broadband, transport and housing.
Bringing broadband soon to the 540,000 homes and businesses that need it, is achievable and with a private partner, it will be cheap. If Mr Varadkar wants votes in the rural constituencies, where Fine Gael suffered in 2016, he should take personal control of this project. But as things stand, he seems uninterested.
If that doesn’t change soon, he will not only be conforming to his own stereotype – that of an aloof city liberal who cares or knows little about events outside Dublin, but he will suffer the consequences in the next election in areas outside Dublin – just as he did during the party leadership race.