In a Word...Roscommon

It is a great scandal of our time. Yet it continues to be ignored by media, the UN, the EU, all of our governments, even by the perennially concerned about everything. Were it an obscure gnat threatened by climate change they’d all be on the streets.

I refer, of course, to disappearing Roscommon people. As every year passes these gifts to humanity drop in number and soon it will be as though we never were. David Attenborough may regale us with tragic tales of threatened species of animal/plant life, but the world blithely ignores the indisputable fact that all true Rossies will soon be as extinct as the Dodo. No one seems to care.

This precipitous decline in Roscommon people began 44 years ago in 1978 with the closure of St Anne’s maternity ward at the county hospital, the only maternity ward in Roscommon. It was where I was born, as were other members of the family.

My late father, being a man of some foresight and then a Roscommon county councillor, argued passionately in the 1970s against the closure of St Anne’s. It would mean that “soon, there’ll be no more Roscommon people”, he warned. He was not listened to.

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St Anne’s was closed and his prophecy is being borne out with every passing year. None of his grandchildren were born in Roscommon. All came into this world in foreign parts — Mayo, Sligo, Galway, Dublin — with great-grandchildren born in Sydney, Brussels, Philadelphia, Laois and possibly elsewhere but sometimes it’s best not to ask.

In 1954 Fr John O ‘Brien caused quite a stir when he published The Vanishing Irish, a book detailing how our population had continued to decline since the Famine. It was even suggested this might be due, partly at least, to the affection of Irishmen for pubs, greyhounds and horse races.

However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is not a hope in hell any Rossie worthy of the name would in his or her wildest nightmares opt for chastity over greyhounds, horse races, even the pub.

We just can’t be born in our own place any more. Woe is us.

Soon all true Rossies will be gone and the world will pine for us as Romeo did Juliet.

Roscommon, from Irish Ros Comáin, “the wood of (St) Coman”.

inaword@irishtimes.com