Opportune challenges
JOHN O’DWYER SPENT OVER FORTY YEARS IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN SLIGO AND TELLS PAUL DEERING ABOUT RETIREMENT, HIS VIEWS OF THE TOWN NOW, HIS LATEST BOOK AND LIFE IN DERRY WHERE HE SPENT THREE YEARS
THERE was a time when the name John O’Dwyer was literally in The Sligo Champion every week in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a senior figure in local government in the town and the driver of the many projects that have shaped the way the town looks today.
He was Housing Officer, Acting Town Clerk and Executive Officer with special responsibility for Urban Renewal and Development during his time with the former Sligo Corporation so he was quite a household name.
It was a time of unbridalled development in the town and Corporation meetings were akin to Christmas morning with presents being unwrapped in the shape of the latest plans for the town to take advantage of urban renewal status.
Hotels, apartments and of course shopping centres were talked about almost incessantly and to be fair most did get off the ground.
It was a hectic period and John O’Dwyer was very much to the forefront. Now retired and living in Limerick he left Sligo in early 2000s taking in three years in the meantime in Derry as an unpaid director of the Peace and Reconciliation where an appetite for writing first emerged.
He’s had three books published and is working on a fourth. John, a Tipperary native, came to Sligo in 1971 to work with the County Council and there followed a six year stint with Leitrim County Council before returning to Sligo and the Corporation in 1983.
He oversaw many of the changes to Sligo, its streetscape and infrastructure but there’s a strong tinge of a job unfinished in his voice.
“In the early 2000s Sligo was advancing to become the capital of the North West but I always felt it lacked ambition, that it was always difficult to drive development in Sligo.
“I always felt there was a strong resistance to change. Sligo was the stand out beacon at the time for the region but it didn’t grasp that opportunity,” he says.
And the reason? “Just lack of leader- ship, both politically and and at public authority level.”
John will rightly be remembered for driving the Rockwood Parade development along the Garavogue River. It took a lot of vision and drive but there was a time when the plan had stalled.
There was a lack of interest in getting the development off the ground and he says it took the Corporation to become the driver as the spirit wasn’t there elsewhere to do it.
Another project he is proud of is the adoption of the recreation strategy that has come to fruition with the Cleveragh, Forthill and Kevinsfort developments.
“There was certainly a lot of positives but I feel more could have been done particularly in terms of retail. The Wine Street development ought to have been done. It was set up and should have happened.
“It encountered the same difficulties
as happenedhappene with Rockwood Parade but there’s always obstacles and it’s one of those things where someone just had to stick their neck out and take the blows. That kind of drive was necessary and the main power lies with the executive of the local authority. I’m not necessarily blaming politicians for it,” he said.
And, he revealed that when the Rockwood Parade project looked dead in the water as the urban designation had run out his biggest ally was Declan Bree who was then a Labour TD.
“This will surprise many people but he was the only one who was prepared to stand up and open doors. The tax incentives had expired and Sligo looked like a bomb site.
“Only for his political intervention. He introduced me to the right people and eventually John Bruton granted us an extension and it would not have have happened without the intervention of Declan Bree.”
John has been back to Sligo many times and looking at the city now he still feels things could look much better.
“The weakness is still in retail in the town. It’s like there’s been a missed opportunity. Granted, there was the crash but Sligo could still have been better positioned and it failed to take that opportunity and they don’t appear that often. It’s a competitive market and other towns have grasped that. Look at Letterkenny which is thriving,” he says.
John’s pastime has been writing since his retirement and the move to Derry and it has remained with him since Limerick became his home but it’s something he feels he isn’t under pressure to do. At one point he was writing three books at once.
His latest, No More Heroes is a poignant tale that demonstrates the fallibility of man and the ominous shadow of terrorism, whilst showing how intelligent discussion and learning from history can provide hope for the future.
It has been described as a powerful argument on Ireland’s history through a historical fiction/ fantasy novel exploring the lives and viewpoints of Irish heroes now passed.
He doesn’t hold back on his comments on the blood sacrifice of Irish ‘ heroes’ of the past or about the the IRA and its evolution.
His views were influenced by his time in Derry where he met with republicans, nationalists and dissidents while also having regard to his own sense of republicanism from his upbringing in rural County Tipperary.
One thing he has been struck by during his time in Derry was the deprivation suffered by the nationalist community. He believes there are some 30 dissident republican cells numbering 1,000 armed men across Northern Ireland and which carry a far greater threat to peace than any time since 1966.
John says the dissident voice is strong today and that fervour for a united Ireland resides in their hearts like it did in Padraic Pearse’s. To John, the isolating of the dissident viewpoint doesn’t make sense.
“They are being treated as outcasts rather than as humans who have an aspiration in their heart,” he says.
He says the IRA campaign of over 30 years didn’t get a united Ireland and asks what did the Good Friday Agreement achieve. To him it recognised British rule in Northern Ireland officially along with a border for the first time.
He says all it might take to reignite trouble in Northern Ireland could be one incident with a figure emerging who might unify the dissident community. In Derry he says at an official level some 200 adult males are excluded from the city on an annual basis by active republicans and punishment beatings were occurring on a regular basis but it was all brushed under the carpet under the general heading of the Peace Process.
“It’s not a Peace Process it’s a political process,” he says, adding that it was a carefully managed one, allowing control by Sinn Féin over republican communities.
John likes posing questions such as what Pearse would say about the shooting dead of Jean McConville, asking what form of republicanism was that? He doesn’t hold back in his criticism of Sinn Féin claiming they didn’t want the Assembly or the Dáil to work with their agenda being the destabilisation of politics in Northern Ireland.
“They believe they are the legitimate successors of the 1921 government which is still in existence de facto. They still hold that view and see it as a chance of becoming a dictatorship in a united Ireland,” he says.
He believes the Northern Ireland situation remains unresolved and that there’s a need for the re- emergence of a strong moderate nationalist voice and a similar one from the unionist community.
“They need to re- emerge and take on the less than moderates on both sides,” he says. He cites Derry as an example of how unresolved issues are. “Derry is unable to name itself. You dare not call it wrong in the Northern Ireland of today. What kind of society is that? What kind of city is it that it can’t name itself. It’s afraid to speak. Society will not flourish until that fear is gone,” he says. The book asks lots of questions. “What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean all this labelling? It needs to be challenged and that’s what I intend to do,” he says.
IHAVEALWAYS FELT THAT THERE WAS A STRONG RESISTENCETO CHANGE IN SLIGO.