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An Bord Snip: How the West was Done
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Dublin-centric is too light a phrase for the Snip report. Rural Ireland is nailed – and I say this as someone born and bred in Blanchardstown, west Dublin. Many of the local services and State initiatives that combine to sustain the West are singled out for particular attention.
The Western Rail Corridor is proposed for scrappage. The Department of Rural and Gaelteacht Affairs is set to be abolished. Job losses will hit the highly-specialised courses in agricultural colleges. Research and advisory services are also up to lose staff in the short to medium term. The suckler cow scheme is set to go. The Disadvantaged Area Compensatory Allowance Scheme, which was availed of almost solely by people outside the cities is to be considerably reduced. The REPS scheme, which farmers have already been up in arms about, is in the firing line for further cuts – for an idea of the political impact this would have consider that the farmers were abusing Brendan Smith today on this issue before the Snip report was published.
But there’s more…
The Snipers say the Rural Transport Scheme should be abolished. The maintenance budget for regional roads should be reduced by €20m. All development aid grants should cease to all regional airports. County enterprise boards, which are currently dotted around towns all over the country, would be subsumed into the more nationally focused Enterprise Ireland body. All the industrial relations bodies are to be centrally located – where?
there’s even more…
Tipperary Institute to be merged with other Institutes of Technology. The School Transport Scheme – mainly availed of outside the cities – will hit parents who would be asked to pay €500 to have their children bused to school even though the cost was already increased to €300 in the last year, it was around €200 beforehand. The Courts system looks likely to move towards the towns. Off-shore islands will lose massive funding. Local authorities will be merged.
But the really potentially destructive elements will be the proposals to merge small Garda stations that typically cover large geographical rural areas and the similar proposal for small schools. They will cause uproar if taken on board by Government.
The rural TDs will be up in arms.
Honestly though, what would you expect from a bunch of economists? Economists crunch numbers, but politics and real life aren’t about number crunching, or certainly not that kind of greedy reductionistic number crunching that these kind of people engage in.
Cllr Dessie Ellis wants to challenge Colm McCarthy to come & live in Ballymun or Finglas for a month on the €193/week that he is advocating over 500,000 SW recipients to live.
McCarthy is no independent economist. He has right-wing form. He was the M in DKM, one of the cheer-leaders of the property boom & an advocate of tax cuts [the cause of the bubble & bust]. He advocated the privatisation of the West-link, which caused a €25m bridge to cost €1200m – a 48-times increase!
He is an advocate of the “Ricardian equivalence” right-wing economic mantra, which rules out an economic stimulus to help get us out of the recession.
I’ve not had too much time to digest the report but it is hard to argue that we should provide a subsidy of hundreds of euros per year to people who have chosen for the most part to leave outside of towns and away from facilities like schools. Most people in one off housing are not farmers nor are they working the land.
Dan, people do not choose to live outside of towns, they’re born there. It’s our way of life and for most of the history of the state, the government has recognised that our way of life is one they have a duty to preserve.
When those who “chose” to live outside of urban areas made their outrageous decision, most did so in a time where the government provided facilities in their communities. Over the past few years, schools have closed, post offices have closed, Garda stations have closed. More and more services have been “centralised”. Those who haven’t moved away, often either because of the lack of opportunities for employment or because they need to be closer to services, should not have to face further service reductions. These people don’t get public transport. They sometimes have to wait hours for Garda or ambulance services. Many communities have to organise their own water supply. Their roads are often unsafe and have to cart their rubbish for miles in order to comply with the law. They get sweet, f*ck all from the government. All of those services that urban dwellers take for granted simply do not exist in rural areas.
We are not some sort of bloody private limited company. We’re a society and it’s about time that people started to realise that.
We are indeed a society and one in which people are not expected to live with the consequences of their actions and their own choices. And it’s about time people started to realise that too.
Almost of the new one off housing in the last 20 years is nothing to do with the land or farming but is simply people making a personal life style choice and expecting the rest of us to subsidy it. People aren’t for the most part born outside of towns. They are for the most part born in hospitals, great big examples of centralisation that is necessary to have in order provide some services. We can’t have universities in every town or hospitals in every village.
The history of the state is less than 90 years. Are we supposed to be stuck with everything we inherited from the British just because that happens to be the way it was when the state was founded?
And what the government and politicians generally have recognised is that you don’t get elected by pointing out to people that they’re looking contradictory policies.
Schools, Garda stations have been closing for the last 40 years. You’d swear this was something that had only started in the last 2 years under cover of night from what you’ve written.
As for the lack of opportunities for employment, the government doesn’t create jobs it creates the conditions in which jobs can be created. One of the things harm rural Ireland has been the unwillingness to try and get a critical mass for anything. Instead of the spatial strategy being appointed properly we had fudges with Tralee and Killarney and Castlebar and Westport as joint hubs. And even that minimal effort was ignored for decentralisation and other state efforts since then.
“These people don’t get public transport.” Actually, there is a lot of loss marking public transport per head in rural Ireland. And the reason they have to wait hours for Garda or ambulance services because they are hours from those services. The services that urban dwellers take for granted simply do not exist in rural areas because the people in rural areas can’t afford to pay for them and they are too wedded to a lifestyle that they are unwilling to compromise with the physical world. If you live 50 miles from the hospital then you live 50 miles from the hospital. The state builds things in centres of population because that is where the people are, it doesn’t build them there just to spite rural Ireland. I grew up in rural Ireland and if I was making my home there again I wouldn’t be so blind as to do so without accepting that one of the trade-offs for some aspects of my quality of life being better is that others would be worse.
Also, getting back to the example here. Kids in Dublin and other places pay a reduced fare to use the bus and have no specific school buses at all. They don’t get it for free. Making a contribution close to the cost of the service might make some people think twice before building mansions they can’t afford to live in properly.
Personal lifestyle choice? That’s what choosing to live in your community is? I don’t want to live in a country where the cost of choosing a job that is not based on the traditional industry of your community is expulsion from it.
Nobody has asked for a university or hospitals in every village. They’d settle for simple things, like water. Small things, like putting in place an ambulance service that is capable of reaching them before they die when you’re closing the local hospital. Schools and Garda stations have been closing for years, but not always at the same rate, and I’m not quite sure what your point is. Are rural folk suppossed to be content with receiving lesser services simply because they’ve been neglected for so long? We’re not talking about the government’s failure to provide new services, we’re talking about their decisions to withdraw the limited services they were already providing. There are trade-offs for living in a rural area, but having a functioning police, ambulance, water, fire or waste service should not be on the list of trade offs, and I should be able to make that choice to begin with. The way that some decisions on housing are going, young people aren’t given the choice of living in their communities.
A community is something that stretches back generations. It is not uncommon to have families living on the same land since the land war or, before, sometimes long before, then. The notion that an individual should not be allowed to build their home on the land their families have tended for centuries is shocking. While we’re at it, why not round up any travellers still living a nomadic life and pop them into parks. It’d be far easier for the state that way. Why can’t those people just abandon those silly little ways they’re wedded to and get in touch with the material world? The notion that the government should allow communities that have survived famine, war and rebellion to die is not one worth considering.
As for kids in cities paying a bus fare, well they generally don’t need to take a bus to begin with. They don’t have to travel 10 miles just to get to school.
“Personal lifestyle choice? That’s what choosing to live in your community is? I don’t want to live in a country where the cost of choosing a job that is not based on the traditional industry of your community is expulsion from it.”
I suspect you are simply being deliberately awkward for the sake of it. We are not talking about the choose to live in a community but how you choose to live in a community.
Water might seem a simple thing, and if you think it is that simple then why don’t you just collect it free from the rain and use it? Of course, if you have an experience of this you would know that water is a complicated thing to collect, make sure is safe and store safely for later use. And it is much, much cheaper to do all the above in bulk rather than a piecemeal approach per house. I know this because we had to get a well done for our old place and its a messy process. Yet even with the economies of scale we can’t get the people working with the local authorities to treat this resource with enough seriousness to avoid breaching the state’s own guidelines as was recently highlighted.
“The notion that an individual should not be allowed to build their home on the land their families have tended for centuries is shocking.” Well there is an interesting notion. In Ireland before the famine we had constant sub-division which is what in part lead to the impact of the famine being so severe. People had so little land to work with that it left the system vulnerable to an external shock like the blight. A bit like today. People living in one off housing separate from the others in their community that are vulnerable to any reduction in the subsidising of their lifestyle choice.
So like I’ve repeatedly said we’re not talking about the minority of people who are farming and living on the family farm. We are talking about the cousins and the extended relations and in fact many many strangers to areas who are buying plots and choosing to build 5/10 miles outside of towns. That is the reality that undermines to the claims of the others who are continuing to work the land. Also, when the likes of the IRDA talk about a rural tradition of living there is nothing to back up this notion of one-off housing separated by a hundred yards or so. People lived in clusters of some 6/12 houses and subsistence farmed from there. They did not live in splendid isolation.
Just as the public sector unions use those earning less than 20K to hide behind when we find the average warnings are closer to 50K, you use those working the land and carrying on a family tradition to hide behind when justifying the farming of plots for development and the undermining of rural villages and towns.
“Just as the public sector unions use those earning less than 20K to hide behind when we find the average warnings are closer to 50K, you use those working the land and carrying on a family tradition to hide behind when justifying the farming of plots for development and the undermining of rural villages and towns.”
“I suspect you are simply being deliberately awkward for the sake of it. We are not talking about the choose to live in a community but how you choose to live in a community.”
First, I’ve never attempted to say that all rural housing developments amounted to a continuation of a farming tradition or some sort of continuation of a traditional family employment tradition, if that’s what you meant. I’m saying that if you grow up in a community, you should be able to live there if you have a site that is suitable for building by the traditional standards of the area you live in. How do you propose one continues to live in a community if one does not reside there?
“We are talking about the cousins and the extended relations and in fact many many strangers to areas who are buying plots and choosing to build 5/10 miles outside of towns.”
I don’t really care about strangers to areas attempting to build there. You’ll find few people who are angered if some randomer is refused planning permission on a site they bought that was without planning permission to begin with, and few would object if legislation was introduced to ban people who had no ties to a community bullding there. What angers people is a situation where they can’t get permission for a site their parents and grandparents had marked out for the use of their descendants.
“Also, when the likes of the IRDA talk about a rural tradition of living there is nothing to back up this notion of one-off housing separated by a hundred yards or so. People lived in clusters of some 6/12 houses and subsistence farmed from there. They did not live in splendid isolation.”
There’s nothing to back up this tradition? Really? Try the many years that have passed since the repeal of the penal laws that forced people into these clusters to begin with. I’ve written a little on this before. See here: http://associatenotes.blogspot.com/2007/07/pop-archives-06-green-day-in-ireland.html
If you’ve got to go back to pre-famine times in order to claim that our current mode of living does not constitute an important aspect of our heritage and culture, then you’re probably proving the point you’re trying to dismiss. By such standards, the modern Irish language, modern Irish music and modern Irish dance are not part of our heritage. Claiming that something our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents did is not part of our heritage and culture is simply redefining heritage and culture so that they are meaningless.
Remember, sections of the travelling community find their origins in famine times, are we to claim that they don’t have a tradition of travelling since their origins come from post-famine times.
And as for 100 yards constituting splendid isolation, well, by that logic, O’Connell street is separated from Stephen’s Green by a distance the size of a vast desert.
“Water might seem a simple thing, and if you think it is that simple then why don’t you just collect it free from the rain and use it? Of course, if you have an experience of this you would know that water is a complicated thing to collect, make sure is safe and store safely for later use. And it is much, much cheaper to do all the above in bulk rather than a piecemeal approach per house. I know this because we had to get a well done for our old place and its a messy process.”
Agreed, it’s a messy process. Probably not as messy as say, the rural electrification process, but messy. However, for all this messiness, providing people with clean water or electricity is not such a big deal, especially given that we’re not talking about a piecemeal approach. In many rural communities, people have set up group water schemes. The infrastructure is there. The messy part has been completed. The government has refused to take over such schemes for decades.
It makes no sense to be subsidising rail & airports in the west. whatever about the SW cuts, its the endless quangos & white elephants established and supported over the past 12 years which are costing a fortune, in the good times the country could barely afford them. To continue subsidising ‘mom & pop’ airports & PSO flights whilst cutting elsewhere would be an act of folly.