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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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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 ?

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).

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.

The_Valeyard

Decentralisation?

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

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 ?

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.

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?

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

Clandestine

Montroseee wrote: »

Government intervention is clearly required here,

Government intervention caused it in the first place