Madam, – A copy of Frank McDonald’s series on decentralisation (Weekend Review and Home News, September 4th-7th) should be made available to every member of the electorate as an example of the profligate waste of taxpayers’ money by the Government at the height of the so-called boom. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Frank McDonald (“The decentralisation debacle”, Weekend Review, September 4th) handily dismissed the “D plan” as an elaborate Fianna Fáil stroke, but was that all it might have been? No doubt, it was poorly thought through (a senior local authority executive once told me it was “dispersal” rather than “decentralisation”), but I believe the intention had great value, particularly from a rural perspective.
The answer to “who benefits?” can be a cynical short-term analysis in money terms or a longer view of social and developmental gain. I write from Callan, Co Kilkenny (a secondary town of 1,800 people) which had no jobs coming its way. Thomastown, about the same size, stood to get 116 jobs in the Health and Safety Authority. Assuming that these people, with their families, would have lived in the area, one can imagine a major impact of well-qualified people who would have been part of the new thinking and policy of Irish and international government.
The idea that government could be “networked”, connected to the population in a wholly different pattern than being “centralised”, is a revolution still to happen. The obvious image of the internet, accessible and interactive from everywhere, has not yet landed in geographical implementation. This plan could have fundamentally shifted the underlying assumption in this country that there is one major capital city where power is consolidated and then the outlying provinces, which are expected to remain in their “provincial” places.
How is a town like Callan to fulfil its potential: to be a vital, interesting place that offers ideas and opportunities to its young citizens? Government investment in high-quality employment, connected to national and international ideas and trends, would be a great beginning.
While the National Spatial Strategy was still being developed, we invited one of its developers to address the question of how Callan could fit into the hub and gateway picture. He spoke of the importance of movement between smaller centres of population, and finding a particular role in the patterns of interchange and relationship in regionalised activity. A real decentralisation, coupled with strengthened local government, could be of great importance in creating new patterns of differentiated development, which could have lasting benefits for the whole country. – Yours, etc,