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Most miserable and grim towns and villages in Ireland

Infernal Racket

There are many towns and villages in Ireland which just seem to have got left behind in the 40s or 50s. For me, the following towns are the worst I've seen. Granard, Co Longford, stuck in a time warp it can't escape from. Rathdowney in Laois is not far behind. Third I'd go for Castlerea in Roscommon, they still have a travelling cinema which visits once in a while. What are your experiences of towns that time forgot??

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Dufflecoat Fanny

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

The village of Killimor between Portumna and Loughrea in Galway.

Knock

Edenderry

Dundalk

Two Killimor travellers got married and had the reception in the local shoebox of a chipper. I'm not making that up.

andekwarhola

Borris in Ossory

Sober Crappy Chemis

Dufflecoat Fanny wrote: »

Two Killimor travellers got married and had the reception in the local shoebox of a chipper. I'm not making that up.

And they even robbed the 'r' from the shop sign afterwads. Cultue my ase !

[Deleted User]

EmmetSpiceland wrote: »

Are we talk the island of Ireland or just the “republic”?

If it’s the 32 counties, it has to Portadown. A thoroughly joyless “dump” populated with miserable, angry, people.

Dundalk if it’s RoI only. Awful place, awful accent.

Lurgan is worse if we’re doing UK too.

Thelonious Monk

Headford in Galway, shudder

RugbyLover123

candycock wrote: »

Couldn't agree more with u there,Oldcastle stuck in a time warp,dreary and depressing even on a sunny day.

Different folks.. I love Oldcastle and the surrounding countryside, one of my favourite parts of the country I’ve been.

As for depressing - pretty much all of Fermanagh.

lawred2

Plumbthedepths wrote: »

Every town except the one I live in is a kip for a variety of reasons.

Yours is a kip too

Dravokivich

Plumbthedepths wrote: »

Every town except the one I live in is a kip for a variety of reasons.

Every town especially the one I live in, is a kip.

Just looking at all the fashionable "health places" closed up near me during a health crisis. Shows them up for the charlatans they are.

[Deleted User]

Can't believe Bunclody wasn't mentioned on the first page.

[Deleted User]

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Can't believe Bunclody wasn't mentioned on the first page.

Bunclody is a kip but to drive through it it’s lovely with the middle square and trees and all.

freshpopcorn

Another one for Tipp town.
It's like a dreary Lidl store when they first opened in Ireland!

howareyakid

A lot of rural towns and villages appear to be stuck in a time warp. Plenty I could name but I don’t want to single out particular places. With more people choosing to live in cities and with not many social opportunities for young people apart from the GAA, it’s hard to see how the situation will improve for many towns and villages.

[Deleted User]

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

Bunclody is a kip but to drive through it it’s lovely with the middle square and trees and all.

Just don't look at the rest of it.

Hah only messing, there is no rest of it.

fryup

Shannon Town - weird town, weird people > soulless

tastyt

There’s probably only about 5 towns / cities ( not little villages ) in Ireland that most people would agree isn’t a kip.

Sober Crappy Chemis

fryup wrote: »

Shannon Town - weird town, weird people > soulless

Shannon town subtract the weird people is greater than soulless ?

Damn, mathematics is cool!

Xertz

A lot of smaller Irish towns also suffer from our love of not living in towns. If you look at say the towns in Leitrim, the rather small population the county has tends to be scattered into their hinterlands. So the result has been dying villages and towns, most people shopping in the local Lidl or Aldi on the edge of the big town and the villages and small towns end up being a couple of barely able to tick over pubs and maybe a cafe.

We also probably just have too many of them. Pre famine era and before the economic declines of those areas population was often much much larger and hasn’t and won’t recover. Patterns of life changed and some of those villages only existed providing a service to their hinterlands which is no longer being used.

If they don’t have a tourism draw, and many simply don’t as they were built as small market towns and often aren’t in particularly scenic locations and don’t typically have nice architecture, then they go into downward spirals.

tastyt

Thelonious Monk wrote: »

I wonder why so many of our towns are horrible? Nice towns and villages are few and far between. I know the UK has loads of sh*tholes but some of the villages I've been to there are like something from a fairy tale.

Think I remember this being asked before. I remember someone saying it’s because England was so rich that they spent a lot of money on buildings and architecture in these little villages. You even see on those property shows how clean and quaint some of these villages are with proper old buildings and areas for people to meet.

We on the other hand were piss poor and a lot of our towns villages are terribly planned

Xertz

English villages also sit in dense population areas and are sought after places to live, at least the nice ones anyway.

Ireland has some of those too - we have some really nice towns and villages, but we have a lot of crappy ones too.

It’s the same or worse in western France for example. You’ve some absolute gems but then you’ve lots of one horse towns that look like they’ve died decades ago with a run down cafe and a bakery that opens every Tuesday for a few hours and a little Mairie (town hall).

Similar lack of population density and massive changes to how rural life works.

The towns that can do tourism well thrive. The unexceptional ones don’t.

freshpopcorn

howareyakid wrote: »

A lot of rural towns and villages appear to be stuck in a time warp. Plenty I could name but I don’t want to single out particular places. With more people choosing to live in cities and with not many social opportunities for young people apart from the GAA, it’s hard to see how the situation will improve for many towns and villages.

I know lots of towns now and some have being mentioned on this list. They've GAA clubs, a few gyms, boxing clubs, soccer, tennis courts, MMA, swimming pools(sometimes in hotels but open to the public), crafty classes, yoga, etc all going on. There small towns do people really expect a Nandos and Starbucks.

Thelonious Monk

tastyt wrote: »

Think I remember this being asked before. I remember someone saying it’s because England was so rich that they spent a lot of money on buildings and architecture in these little villages. You even see on those property shows how clean and quaint some of these villages are with proper old buildings and areas for people to meet.

We on the other hand were piss poor and a lot of our towns villages are terribly planned

But even p*ss poor parts of Italy and other countries have beautiful old villages.
We must have been just extremely underdeveloped compared to every other European country. Scotland also has lovely villages, I have been to many nice ones there around the borders.

road_high

Oops! wrote: »

Thurles.... A town dying on it's knees, No industry, industrial estates idle, streets with buildings boarded up and falling down... A square that even the locals don't know how to drive around properly never mind anybody that has the misfortune just to be passing through it... And another place that has a serous drug problem thats so obvious on the streets if it was not so serous would be funny.... A dive.

Thurles is pretty bad. As are most Tipperary towns bar Cashel

Rufeo

Dublin

Thelonious Monk

Rufeo wrote: »

Dublin

Parts are total kips but it also has the nicest urban areas in Ireland

Wanderer2010

That place in Mayo. I think its Swinford, did they film something like the Hardy Bucks there? Pass through on a few days tour of Mayo last year, Jesus its dull, its like there is a whole grey film of misery over the town, I say town but its really just one main street with a statue at the top of it. A lot of the shops are closed and I can only imagine what the boarded up nightclub was like back in "the day".

I do like strange and quirky places, anything that isn't mainstream basically but the ratio of misery to kookiness in Swinford was way out of whack, I was delighted to get out of there.

Xertz

Thelonious Monk wrote: »

But even p*ss poor parts of Italy and other countries have beautiful old villages.
We must have been just extremely underdeveloped compared to every other European country. Scotland also has lovely villages, I have been to many nice ones there around the borders.

We were in a dire state economically during a time when many were in the industrial revolution. Ireland didn’t have iron, coal or the things that drove they and was being run remotely by an essentially foreign government and system of laissez faire economics and an ideology driven both by that and sectarianism & a rigid class system we were almost all on the wring side of and a touch of xenophobia / hibernophobia and so on that literally didn’t care if we lived or died, lever mind prospered.

So yeah, we have the signs of that in our built environment.

That being said, we do have some lovely towns too. It’s not all a story of depressing dead villages by any means.

A lot of them also make up for their lack of architecture with vibrancy.

To me rural Ireland often has more in common with rural parts of Newfoundland, Canada generally even parts of the US or Iceland in terms of architecture - there’s a lot of utilitarian buildings.

We’ve some ancient heritage and the architecture and built environment is definitely older and wealthier in the cities and the south and east, but there are plenty of cute, colourful villages and the odd architectural gem like say Westport or Clifden. Even Donegal Town with its diamond square.

Many of the small towns villages in Kerry and West Cork are absolutely charming places - full of colour and vibrancy.

We just have a lot of old villages in areas where the population to support them isn’t there anymore and that came from poor, utilitarian roots where they built what they could afford.

There’s no point in wallowing in it though. Irish history is what it is. We are different from many of our industrial revolution and renaissance driven neighbours in that regard and our towns are largely much newer as a result.

Mervyn Skidmore

Slideways wrote: »

Gurteen, Co Sligo.

A grim grim place that has had far too many tragedy’s happen in it too

Gurteen? It's just a one street village with nothing in it, wouldn't say it's particularly bad.

Ipso

Xertz wrote: »

Perhaps it's improved, but I really couldn't warm to Bundoran. The towns near by were lovely but just something oddly 'draining' about it.

I think the problem is that it attracted a certain type of scumbag. Lovely location and Tullan beach is beautiful. Then you’ve got Rossnowlagh not too far away, attracts a lot of tourists but not so many scummers.

Kylta

Xertz wrote: »

I thought Cahir and Cashel are both quite nice.

Yeah good castle and abbey

Masala

Borrisokane.....and when you exit the town you realize that you will be ruining your new set of tyres soon as the road surfaces are so bad that it knock off you4 tracking.