The Minister of State for Rural Development, Mr Eamon ╙ Cu∅v, may be doing his best to stem falling populations in rural Ireland, but women in the west are not impressed.
Ms Marian Flannery of the Women of the North West organisation believes that citizenship rights are being neglected by those State bodies responsible for planning and development of educational initiatives.
Ms Flannery delivered her criticism at last week's publication of a research report by the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI) in Dublin.
The report has found that women's organisations and groups which provide vital counselling, support and crisis services are seriously underfunded, although they help up to 75,000 people a year.
Women of the North West, in Moygownagh, Ballina, Co Mayo, is a network of 26 women's groups from north and west Mayo. The community development work in which it is engaged is concerned with "changing the reality of rural women's lives", Ms Flannery explained.
"It is about ensuring that rural women do not settle for less." There is a perception among her members that the Irish Countrywomen's Organisation (ICA) does not represent rural women any more.
Women in rural areas were being denied the right to adequate income, to adequate education and training, to adequate health services, to equal say in local decision-making, and above all, to a fair share in the benefits of rural development, she said. A level of political will by Government ministers and social policy shapers was required, she emphasised.
Core funding from the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs for women's groups had had a very positive effect, she said. However, this type of support did not extend across all Government departments, and there appeared to be no great concern about access by rural women to education and training, she said.
Ms Flannery said at the NWCI function that the gap in education and training provision for rural women had been wide open for a long time. Rural women's invisibility and lack of representation in the social partnership process had left them at the back of the queue, she said.
"We are managed and manipulated, we do not have a just say. We contribute so much to the Irish economy, we constitute the cheap labour on Irish farms, we are the ones who tend the land and the livestock, and yet the reality is that our names appear on very few land deeds.
"This is a major inequality," she said.