West classified as 'region in decline' by EU

magicbastarder wrote: »

dispersed houses are more expensive to provide services to. post, electricity, broadband, etc.

i will try to dig it out, but i once read that ireland uses four times as much miles of copper per capita in providing electricity to domestic customers than in the UK.

There are similar statistics on the phone network.

The Open Eir network in reality consists of about 45 actual telephone exchanges and something like 1600+ "RSUs" (remote subscriber units) which are the things that we tend to call 'exchanges' but actually are in reality just satellites of their parent switch. Some of them are big, especially in Cork and Dublin etc.. i.e. might have 10,000-15,000 lines hanging off them but in a lot of rural RSUs you could be talking 100 lines or fewer.

That's also a large part of the reason why in the old days i.e. pre digital, it was extremely hard to service rural Ireland. The post 1980 digital switches allowed us for the first time to serve some of those communities at reasonable cost as they were based on early distributed technologies, notably the Alcatel stuff that was designed for similar situations in far flung parts of rural France. With electromechanical era exchanges i.e. pre 1980s, there really wasn't very much technology that was usable in tiny places. Technologies like crossbar and so on were really expecting at least a few hundred lines per node. That's why many places were stuck with a plug-board in the post office and the local postmistress as operator.

With broadband, copper based ADSL never worked well in rural / semi rural hinterland areas because the copper lines are really really long. You can get voice service down a 4km line quite effectively, but DSL services drop off after at most a couple of km and there are very few ways of overcoming that problem.

VDSL and ADSL work great in towns and even small villages - any cluster of say 60+ connections and you can put in a cabinet / RSU and 100mbit/s+ broadband.

Then take something like the water pollution issues caused by malfunctioning septic tanks etc. Most of that is due to a proliferation of low density housing that's incredibly expensive to service with sewers but is slightly more dense than is safe to avoid ground water contamination. You saw loads of that around the lakes near Athlone and so on where there was this springing up of a scatter of homes from the 1960s onwards in lake-side locations and no public sewage systems.

The list goes on and on and on with these issues. Everything we do costs way more because we don't seem to be willing to cluster houses. It's not even about living in big cities. We don't even do villages, and often undermine their development by scattering housing the hinterland. The result is everyone drives to the local Lidl/Aldi and the village that was dies as people move out into rural one off stuff. So you end up with a hollowed out half dead village somewhere and a really low density scatter into the surrounding countryside. You certainly see that kind of pattern all over places like North Leitrim and Roscommon and so on.

I just think if rural areas are going to thrive and prosper long term, they need to focus on trying to become economically sustainable and that does involve developing villages and it doesn't have to be pokey developer-driven speculative town house estates either. They're not attractive to most people, but how about developing seriously nice serviced land in and around villages and encouraging people to build there rather than out in the middle of a field somewhere?

Again just to look at the towns in North Leitrim, a lot of them flung up houses in the Celtic tiger era that would make sense in the middle of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway etc, but make absolutely zero sense in a small village where people have an expectation of a bit of space and privacy - gardens etc. There were loads of developments of town houses, apartments, duplexes and so on that sat empty because that simply isn't the kind of housing that people want in those kinds of places. From what I could see, a lot of it was also driven by applying large urban design ideologies to tiny villages - hence the gardenless duplex apartments etc etc that nobody wanted.

Take a look at what's done in say Norwegian villages - you get big spacious houses built on serviced land in / near towns and villages. It's a good compromise between the desire to have plenty of space and the need to cluster to be both sustainable and economically viable.

Living in a very small town can be extremely desirable, IF it has the right mix of housing and facilities and we still don't get that right.

There's also a huge advantage to some of this stuff as we age - you're not depending on people to drive you everywhere.

I'd also argue that this kind of thing shouldn't be about compulsion or forcing people to be in villages. They should be places that are desirable to live in.

We need to evolve a workable Irish solution to an Irish problem and I think that has to combine our desire for space and individualism with an ability to cooperate and cluster things. That isn't going to be achieved by trying to rigorously follow some notion of an imported model be it from somewhere in continental Europe or England. We need to come up with a solution that works for rural Irish wants, needs and ideals about what housing should be.

I genuinely do think we have a very different idea of how we want to live and that's something that we should be working with and not seeing as something we should necessarily change. There's nothing wrong with wanting a bit of space and privacy, but it can be done in the context of much better use of space.

The big problem though is we are where we are. You can't undo decades of bad planning, particularly as the houses all exist, but you can at least try and avoid compounding the problems by continuing to undermine the regional cities (and Dublin actually too) with pathetically weak local government. If you consider the 5 cities in Ireland, including Dublin, have less power to manage their own development in terms of things like transit systems, facilities, education etc than your average tiny village in rural France.

I'd also argue that we need to reestablish town councils but with a far better structure and setup than they had before. There was no logic to which towns had and hadn't town councils / UDCs other than that's what they had in the 19th century and nothing changed.

I'd argue that every town and village in Ireland should have some kind of cost-effective local government system similar to what you see elsewhere in Europe. It's bizarre that we don't have it as those are the structures that drive local discussion and implementation of services and making those villages and towns desirable to live in.

What we seem to have is a parallel system of volunteers doing what should be local government roles e.g. Tidy towns committees and local development groups and so on all desperately trying to make their towns and villages better, without any of the democratic mandate, legal powers or normal structures to do so.

The whole thing is a watered-down mess and has been for decades and we seem to have almost no political will to change it and nobody's really driving any discussion on why it's wrong.

Good development plans and decent towns and villages and cities don't happen just out of some kind of random accidental thing. They happen because there are good structures in place to facilitate their development.

I find Ireland has a tendency to wallow in self-pity about how things are cultural when they're in reality down to structural issues. There's absolutely no reason that our cities and towns couldn't be as well run as anyone else's in Europe, other than we don't have the structures in place to allow that to happen and there's no line of accountability to the local population really - it's all watered down or powers are exercised by central government or totally unaccountable agencies e.g. OPW, TII etc or by government departments who are often driven by a minister who's an interest in their own constituency or are hampered by national political issues.

Also there's a rather erroneous notion that Dublin has power. The Dail sits in Dublin but the city itself has no ability to run its own affairs any more than Cork has and it's suffering as a result - i.e. no metro, inadequate infrastructure, squabbles over policing resources etc. and we seem to be incapable thinking of cities other than Dublin as viable urban areas. I still encounter ridiculous attitudes about Cork City being "down the country" etc

We are on most measures the most centralised country in the OECD and EU and I find it's ridiculous that we can't take initiatives on local government ourselves instead of having to be dragged into doing something about it by the EU. I would actually suspect that had it not been for European notions of subsidiarity, the Irish political tendency would have been to do away with local authorities entirely because back bench TD survive by fixing their constituents' potholes and streetlamps.

lostcat wrote: »

rather Dublin is eating the rest of the country.

? Does that statement actually mean anything?

The missing element in all this is critical self-analysis by rural advocates. They need to get clear about what it is that they actually want, and why all the many attempts to develop rural areas have achieved so little.

Do rural sub post offices and one/two teacher schools actually support a thriving rural society? If so, why hasn't it thrived? Are rail services really important for rural Ireland? If so, is the area along the Westport and Sligo rail services showing some results?

There's a perfect willingness to refocus on a positive agenda. But too many rural advocates have the mindset of a menopausal woman. It's all so emotionally fraught, for reasons that never quite become clear, and you have the feeling that only Dr Freud could really tell you what's going on.

ednwireland wrote: »

but we are here and hoping to double in size in the next 12 months with this investment.

there is an amercican company in the town doubleing the size of its operation

And that's good to hear.

ednwireland wrote: »

my house is in the coutryside but its on the 1854 ordnace survey maps so hardly a recent addition

Grand, but also fair enough to note that Census figures half of the housing stock in County Donegal was built in the period 1991-2011.

Would you feel all that relatively recent housing was planned in such a way as to make it easy to provide infrastructure and services?