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Decentralisation - How great is the need?

Montroseee

I've lived in Wicklow Town for the vast majority of my youth and never has it had such a ghost town/depressing appearance as today. Boarded up units, vacant shops, large dole queues and just generally run down. Arklow is similar if not worse and I've plenty of friends in Athlone who are complaining of the same phenomenon.

These are not small little shanty towns with a population of 200, these are large towns with catchment areas of tens of thousands and it is such a shame to see them slowly disintegrate. Even small towns in the greater Dublin Area such as Bray are beginning to show similar signs.

I always make the effort to shop local and buy as much as I can from retailers within the area but there is little else I can do as a citizen. This is partially why rents and prices are so high at the minute in Dublin, a huge portion of the people I know want to relocate to Dublin for the opportunities available there. It's a far cry from the vacant shop windows and kip these towns are turning into.

Government intervention is clearly required here, although I'm sure exactly what. Most foreign investment goes to either of the three big cities but I think it's imperative for the long term survival of these towns that there is some incentives given to locate there. There is little future for local entrepreneurship in the town and it's just such a shame to see these towns dying a slow death. What do the good folk of AH think could be done?

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Clandestine

Montroseee wrote: »

Government intervention is clearly required here,

Government intervention caused it in the first place

Jeefff

The place is fecked, I'm living out in the sticks, mid west, every second person is on the dole (not exactly but you get the idea) was called into the welfare office last week to go on a CE scheme cutting grass locally, was then told I was too young, have to be 25.
Welfare officer then told me straight to move to dublin or emigrate, as my only two options..

Nice

NegativeCreep

Why waste money trying to preserve the areas? No large company is going to choose Wicklow to set up shop in.

Why is centralisation always seen as a negative thing?

Adamantium

The country's population is too small really, Ireland could easily house 20 million people and due to economies of scale these pockets of inactivity would disappear. For comparison look at the geographical size of the UK which has 60 million, we have 6 , we are seriously underpopulated.

Leitrim had 155,000 before the famine, now we have 32,000, that is insane.

It is like this everywhere though throughout the country, although it is a particularly Irish phenomenom that most small old towns have very little people walking around them, Japanese tourists are often in wonder of this.

Frankly we've become service telephone relay and making phone calls, is a pretty neutral economic activity, we don't make a damn thing though and neither does much of the western world. You can go to any small town and the places are disintegrating. Any small town in the USA.

Lapin

Montroseee wrote: »

and I've plenty of friends in Athlone who are complaining.....

Everyone in Athlone complains about everything.

I'm just shocked that you admit to having 'friends' there.

Are you sure about that bit ?

The_Valeyard

Decentralisation?

Didnt they try this in the boom times and the whole thing just did not work?

FanadMan

Only going by the thread name here

Decentralization happened years ago. Government moved a lot of the Social Welfare to places like Sligo and Longfort. The whole idea was to move people out of Dublin. But it caused it's own problems - housing. I know a family living in Carrick on Shannon - one is working in Sligo and the other person is working in Dublin. Thing is, they are far happier living in Carrick - far rather it to being in Dublin. But would you really blame them?

But on the flip side, both Sligo and Carrick have had a boom in population since the move......sadly not enough though. Leitrim has so many ghost estates - all built as commuter towns.

comongethappy

Montroseee wrote: »

I've lived in Wicklow Town for the vast majority of my youth and never has it had such a ghost town/depressing appearance as today. Boarded up units, vacant shops, large dole queues and just generally run down. Arklow is similar if not worse and I've plenty of friends in Athlone who are complaining of the same phenomenon.

These are not small little shanty towns with a population of 200, these are large towns with catchment areas of tens of thousands and it is such a shame to see them slowly disintegrate. Even small towns in the greater Dublin Area such as Bray are beginning to show similar signs.

I always make the effort to shop local and buy as much as I can from retailers within the area but there is little else I can do as a citizen. This is partially why rents and prices are so high at the minute in Dublin, a huge portion of the people I know want to relocate to Dublin for the opportunities available there. It's a far cry from the vacant shop windows and kip these towns are turning into.

Government intervention is clearly required here, although I'm sure exactly what. Most foreign investment goes to either of the three big cities but I think it's imperative for the long term survival of these towns that there is some incentives given to locate there. There is little future for local entrepreneurship in the town and it's just such a shame to see these towns dying a slow death. What do the good folk of AH think could be done?

I'm not sure what corporations will want to be forced to locate to a town of 9,000 people?
(Said as a Wicklow towner).

On the contrary, Ireland can do with real centralisation. 4-5 cities of proper sustainable & scalable population density, (Something lacking at the moment).

Sunnyisland

comongethappy wrote: »

I'm not sure why corporations will want to be forced to locate to a town of 9,000 people?
(Said as a Wicklow towner).

On the contrary, Ireland can do with real centralisation. 4-5 cities of proper sustainable & scalable population density, (Something lacking at the moment).

Was it not tried ? And as far as I remember it was the workforce themselfs who did not want to decentralise ?

Capt'n Midnight

If Decentralisation was about providing an economic boost rather than trying to buy rural votes then the only place outside of Dublin they'd have decentralised to would have been Moyross

you only have to look at the low take up of the positions despite lots of sweeteners and pressure, not to mention the far lower cost of housing and living down the sticks

Of course if we had rural broadband then people could telecommute. Pipe dream really and it would have cost a fraction of what was spend on the roads during the boom. Very roughly speaking you could have wiredup half the country with fibre for the cost of buying out the M50 toll bridge.

comongethappy

realies wrote: »

Was it not tried ? And as far as I remember it was the workforce themselfs who did not want to decentralise ?

The OP was specifically mentioning private sector & FDI.

When seeking X-number of staff, companies are often unwilling to locate in areas with a tiny labour pool.

I'm not sure what forcing companies to compromise on that achieves?

Freddie Dodge

Comongethappy has a good point, other countries have several decent sized cities rather than one which overweighs the rest.
Why is Ireland like this? Mostly historical, partly economics.
How can it be fixed? Govt investment and incentives to invest in Cork, Limerick & Galway.
Fibre broadband outside the cities and large towns would help.

tritium

The population in this country is too small, to make these areas viable we need more people in the country as a whole not just to shrink Dublin

Dublin also due to its scale has facilities and infrastructure that many parts of the country could never sustain. If you look at any of the large companies located outside cities a huge part of their workforce still commutes from the nearby cities. Its not just a dublin thing either, when elan was huge in athlone they had many employees coming from galway every morning.

Dublin's size also in many ways benefits the country. It has a critical mass that means its tax take and commercial activities help support the rest of the country. You can't simply move bits of that and expect the net effect to be unchanged.

Also, the desolation phenomena you describe isn't unique to rural Ireland. Look at parts of the inner city or ballymun and for a variety of reasons (including economic) you'll see similar lack of opportunity and communities struggling.

To be honest we pissed away a great opportunity during the boom. A policy of a) massive inward migration coupled with b) aggressive support for indigenous large scale enterprise and c) development of 2-3 additional large scale population centres, e.g. dramatically grow galway or limerick in a sustainable manner might just have given us a long term shot. That said we still have social exclusion much like most other countries worldwide.

shruikan2553

Freddie Dodge wrote: »

Comongethappy has a good point, other countries have several decent sized cities rather than one which overweighs the rest.
Why is Ireland like this? Mostly historical, partly economics.
How can it be fixed? Govt investment and incentives to invest in Cork, Limerick & Galway.
Fibre broadband outside the cities and large towns would help.

This is what I say. Dublin has a far higher population so we should get more people into the 3 mentioned. How we get people into these cities I don't know. There is an odd obsession about there only being jobs there

Alun

comongethappy wrote: »

I'm not sure what corporations will want to be forced to locate to a town of 9,000 people?

This is it in a nutshell. To the people of Wicklow, I'm sure they view their town as large enough to support such industries, but the truth of the matter is that in population terms, it's not a large town, more like a large village.

Where I lived in the Netherlands would be considered a medium sized town, and that had a population of 44,000. The town I was born in in England, and which nobody here, or in fact many in England, would even have heard of has 65,000. Both have sizeable well-known companies based there.

SEPT 23 1989

Maybe there are shag all jobs down the country because when foreign companies came over to invest in the 70's and 80's they were accosted by the local FF scumbag looking for a large donation for the party,when the companies refused to line these scumbags pockets things were made so difficult for them they never invested

Davarus Walrus

Very little that can be done. Manufacturing in Ireland is on the way out, and service orientated companies would rather move to large population centres. Sticking a few civil servants down in an office in a 3/4's empty industrial estate on the outskirts of Ballygobackwards isn't going to turn the fortune of the place around.

comongethappy

shruikan2553 wrote: »

This is what I say. Dublin has a far higher population so we should get more people into the 3 mentioned. How we get people into these cities I don't know. There is an odd obsession about there only being jobs there

Indeed.

Population is the whole ball game.
Ireland just isn't densely populated.

Take Donegal (as a rather extreme example).
Co Donegal is the 8th most populace county in Ireland.
However its biggest town has less than 20,000 people.
The next largest town, around 10,000.

Donegal people bemoan the belief they have been forgotten.
But whether its a company looking at the local labour pool for investment, or governments looking at where to get the best return on infrastructure spending, while the people of donegal scatter themselves to the four-winds, investment cannot follow.

The only way to viably counter Dublin's gravitational pull is to greatly enhance the other cities.
Throwing money at glorified villages won't do it.

titan18

Should offer incentives to move to Cork,Limerick, Galway, Waterford etc. Get employment into the other cities, and then later on can attempt with towns if that works, rather than majority of companies going to Dublin.

It's the biggest city which is fair enough but it just continues a cycle of people moving to Dublin, Dublin getting bigger and everywhere else getting smaller, and just makes it harder for anywhere else to get companies then.

Freddie Dodge

I don't think anyone is suggesting more de-centralization of government departments to small towns, nor is anyone (with a brain anyway) suggesting that every town of +1500 people should have multi national corporations but it would help if the people in these towns had a proper city within 1 - 1 and a half hours drive, as opposed to having everything in Dublin and little in the other cities.
From personal experience, Galway feels like a big town, Limerick shuts down at 6pm, and Waterford feels quieter than Athlone most of the time. Cork is the only one with that "city feel" about it, and imo has the most potential to grow.

Rightwing

Decentralisation was a FF conjob...similar to Transport 21.

Keep the locals happy, whilst they get the Googles etc of this world into Dublin.

Our governments are bereft of ideas...apart from a 2% corporation tax. :rolleyes:

donegal__road

FF wasted €44m on decentralisation mainly by acquiring sites for the Government’s decentralisation programme in locations where plans to transfer public service offices and State agencies have been either postponed or axed.

€43m decentralisation sites left lying idle

The Office of Public Works has confirmed that 12 sites bought for over €43m for the Government’s scrapped decentralisation plan are lying idle.

Among them is a 2.1-acre site in Drogheda for which the State paid €12.4m. The others were bought with taxpayers’ money for prices ranging from €390,000 for a six-acre site in Knock, to €8.25m for a 5.3-acre site in Mullingar.

The OPW has only shed light on how one of the 12 locations can be utilised into the future.

The 9.1-acre Portlaoise site, which was purchased for €1,027,636, is “under consideration for use in the consolidation of accommodation for 480 staff”. It is not clear what will happen to the other holdings.

The OPW told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee the sites would have been bought for market value during the property boom.

the question is who owned the sites?

comongethappy

donegal__road wrote: »

the question is who owned the sites?

Some form of golden circle/insider I'd wager.

suicide_circus

Rural ireland is far too sparsely populated to create meaningful and sustainable infrastructure. The gá for single dwellings is not compatible with delivery of efficient services.

Cookie_Monster

decentralisation is/was just an excuse to piss away taxpayers money with absolutely no benefit and nothing but higher longer term costs and loss of synergies and economies of scale.

Quin_Dub

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Of course if we had rural broadband then people could telecommute. Pipe dream really and it would have cost a fraction of what was spend on the roads during the boom. Very roughly speaking you could have wiredup half the country with fibre for the cost of buying out the M50 toll bridge.

This is the only "decentralisation" idea that should be considered..

As another poster mentioned - we don't build things , we are not exactly going to attract a "factory production line" entity to come to Ireland - With the possible exception of Big Pharma..

So - If we had proper high-end Broad-band available , people could live wherever they wanted and still get exactly the kind of jobs that are currently available in Dublin/Cork today (Call centre , Developer/tester etc.)

[Deleted User]

Freddie Dodge wrote: »

Comongethappy has a good point, other countries have several decent sized cities rather than one which overweighs the rest.
Why is Ireland like this? Mostly historical, partly economics.
How can it be fixed? Govt investment and incentives to invest in Cork, Limerick & Galway.
Fibre broadband outside the cities and large towns would help.

Not particularily - centralised countries tend to have a large dominant capital with the next city being a fraction of the size - (Dublin v Cork, London v Manchester, Paris v Lyon)

Decentralised or federal countries tend to have more balanced cities or even relatively small capitals (Washington DC v New York, Boston, Chicago, LA etc, Canberra, Brasilia) Germany is an interesting one as Bonn was a small city but Berlin is particularily large.

Decentralisation as it was sold in Ireland was really more like out-sourcing to smaller towns. The decisions were still being made in Dublin, the processing was happening in Ballinsloe or wherever.

I'm not sure if we are big enough to gain much from decentralisation in the truest sense (decisions being made locally) The inefficiences identified in the provision of water being an example.

If we were to outsource out of Dublin I would have rathered if the work were concentrated in Limerick or Waterford. It would have generated some economies of scale while helping the local economy.

listermint

Is there not something to be said for Wicklow County Council . 'Local housing for locals only' Policy. Which is frankly Illegal under EU law.

This local needs crap that prevents anyone without a ridiculously strong connection to the area (wicklow) building within the counties borders.

Some superb policies there for bringing in new life into the county right there.

Got to give them a good clap on the back for trying to keep those foreign dubs out of their borders :rolleyes:

Reep what you sow!

Sleepy

The decentralization of government depts to more rural locations was actually a good idea in principle imo.

Huge numbers of public service jobs amount to little more than basic administration. Despite what the unions would have you believe, these "low paid" paper pushers actually represent the most over-paid members of the public service (while many of their higher skilled colleagues earn lower base salaries than their private sector counterparts, the lower level admin staff earn significantly more than their counterparts in the private sector).

Locating these positions in rural locations where property prices are lower should have made a lot of sense: 25k a year in Dublin won't buy you a house but it might well do so in a more rural location. It should have both helped slow rural depopulation, provided good jobs outside of the capital and helped keep the costs of public administration down.

Of course, the unions got greedy and the government didn't have the balls to simply make redundant staff who weren't prepared to re-locate redundant and re-hire in the new location so the whole thing fell apart.

Quin_Dub

Sleepy wrote: »

The decentralization of government depts to more rural locations was actually a good idea in principle imo.

Huge numbers of public service jobs amount to little more than basic administration. Despite what the unions would have you believe, these "low paid" paper pushers actually represent the most over-paid members of the public service (while many of their higher skilled colleagues earn lower base salaries than their private sector counterparts, the lower level admin staff earn significantly more than their counterparts in the private sector).

Locating these positions in rural locations where property prices are lower should have made a lot of sense: 25k a year in Dublin won't buy you a house but it might well do so in a more rural location. It should have both helped slow rural depopulation, provided good jobs outside of the capital and helped keep the costs of public administration down.

Of course, the unions got greedy and the government didn't have the balls to simply make redundant staff who weren't prepared to re-locate redundant and re-hire in the new location so the whole thing fell apart.

Not a lot I'd disagree with there...