Rural €30m investment programme just ‘a first step’

The Government’s €30 million investment in the “attractiveness and sustainability” of rural areas is a “first step”, but it will not revitalise rural Ireland, employers say.

What rural Ireland needs is jobs, which depend on communications, particularly broadband, and transport.

This is according to a range of employers and development advocates who say the plan by the Government to spend €30 million over five years does not go far enough.

Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly and Minister of State for Rural Affairs Ann Phelan had launched the programme at the National Ploughing Championships earlier on Wednesday.

19-year wait

Long-time campaigner for infrastructure Bernard Coyle of food processor Mr Crumb - which employs more than 100 people in Finea, Co Westmeath - said his company was first promised broadband telecommunications 19 years ago.

Redeveloped town sewerage was promised 17 years ago but it didn’t happen, he said, and in the intervening years the local Garda station closed, as did the post office, a local health centre and a number of shops and pubs.

“The promises kept coming and broadband was recently rolled out to Castlepollard, eight miles away - and then on to Coole, where there is no factory. We’ve been missed again,” he said.

Mr Coyle said he had heard all the initiatives and all the reports, and is tired of offerings which target growth over five to six years.

“I’m here only because of the staff. If I was to start again it would not be in rural Ireland but in a major town,” he said.

Gerry Galligan runs Sheelin Meats, a wholesale butchery and retail chain of about four shops across the midlands, which employs about 20 people.

Deeply frustrated

He is deeply frustrated with the lack of communications technology and says he could expand if he could manage the information flow between his businesses.

Séamus Boland of Irish Rural Link said “broadband is the big one”, but that there are other issues preventing development in rural Ireland, including public transport and secondary roads. “The money is a welcome start, but it is just that”, he said, “a start”.

As far back as 2000 a report, Rural Transport - a National Study from the Community Perspective, found more than a third of the rural population has no access to transport or a serious difficulty with regard to it.

A decade later the joint Oireachtas committee on Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs said rural public transport had “major implications for employment” as well as access to medical services and social isolation.

Earlier this year, the report of the Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas (Cedra), described rural transport as “problematic”.

Targeted stimulus

Cedra recommended piloting a number of rural economic development zones, with a targeted stimulus programme for rural towns. It is understood this report will inform the share-out of the €30 million in Government funding over five years.

The figures are similar to the €30 million investment leveraged by the Western Development Commission, which claims 2,500 jobs over the last five years have been sustained by the investment.

While commission chief executive Ian Barrington welcomed the new initiative, he joined Séamus Boland in describing it as “a start”.

“It is a good step as opposed to the end of the line,” said Mr Barrington.