After decades of feeling neglected by the Government and State agencies, the people of Donegal are taking action - and getting results. Rosita Boland reports
The forgotten county. Somewhere along the way, Donegal acquired this name, and it's stuck. The question is, forgotten by whom? Embarrassingly for the Government, in 2004 it emerged that whatever about forgetting the county as a whole, they certainly forgot about the Inishowen peninsula, located in Donegal's north-east. In a publication distributed throughout the 10 accession countries that year, with a print-run of 100,000, the boundaries of the Government-issued map infamously showed Inishowen as being part of Co Derry.
For the people of Donegal, it was a very public example of how they have come to think they are perceived by the rest of the State - neither here nor there, but a difficult-to-get-to, in-between place where borders are flexible and where even the authorities are not sure what exactly they are supposed to be responsible for.
Lately, however, two high-profile groups have been campaigning to remind Government bodies of their responsibilities to what the people of the north-west consider their due rights.
Donegal Action for Cancer Care (DACC), which is campaigning for improved oncology services for the county, attracted a remarkable turnout of 15,000 people in torrential rain at a rally in Letterkenny on May 14th.
On June 30th, the Health Service Executive (HSE) backtracked on a previous decision and announced that Letterkenny General Hospital (LGH) would get a permanent breast cancer surgeon after all - the top priority on DACC's list of needs.
This is an impressive outcome under any circumstances, but given that the DACC was only formed in April last year, and now has some 30 branches throughout the county, with an estimated 70 people in each group, it is a testament to the tenacity of all those involved.
"It takes a lot to get us Donegal people worked up," Denise Brown, co-secretary of DACC, said this week, "because we're good natured and laid-back - but we're worked up now."
Two days before the HSE's announcement, on June 28th, the North West Regional Tourism Authority held an extraordinary general meeting in Bundoran. They voted by 68 to four to reject the proposal by the Government to dissolve the current board so that they could be merged with Fáilte Ireland, along with all other regional tourism groups. The other four regional tourism boards had all already agreed to the new structure, which will have more centralised administrative boards.
Chairman Sean McEniff, a hotelier in Bundoran, urged the stand-off, saying that there was no guarantee that Donegal - and the other counties, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Sligo - would in future be represented by local people, who knew the counties best.
On Wednesday, McEniff travelled to Dublin to meet Minister for Tourism John O'Donoghue. While he did not receive an assurance that the region would continue to be represented solely by people from the region, he did get a promise of additional funding to help market the region, particularly Donegal, more prominently, both home and abroad.
As a result, at the reconvened meeting of the board on Wednesday, McEniff will be now recommending the current board be dissolved - weeks after all the other regional tourism groups agreed to do so. At the very least, Donegal people are currently proving to be a surprisingly consistent headache for the Government.
"We're a problem to the Dublin Government, and if they had the opportunity to redraw the Border they would," declares Jim O'Donnell, from near Dungloe, the public relations officer for DACC. O'Donnell and three of the seven other members of the executive committee - all of whom are working on a voluntary basis - have gathered in a Letterkenny hotel.
"We're on the periphery of Europe, and Dublin really does seem to believe we are part of Northern Ireland. That mindset is there and we're getting a bit fed up with it. The Troubles didn't help by contributing to our isolation - people from the South didn't want to cross the border to get here - but the Government shouldn't allow our health services to deteriorate as a result."
BREAST CANCER IS the most common form of cancer in Donegal, with an estimated 55 per cent of all cancer patients in the county currently being treated for it. Denise Brown, from St Johnstown, and Lynn McDevitt from Glenswilly, DACC's co-chairwoman, have both had it, and their experiences made them want to become involved in campaigning for better local services.
Among the other things DACC wants are a satellite radiation unit for the north-west, and breast screening (Breast Check is not yet in Donegal), for those women still awaiting mammograms.
While chemotherapy is available in LGH, all cancer patients must currently travel to either Dublin or Galway for post-surgery radiation treatment. The Derry-based hospital, Altnagelvin, is geographically the closest to Donegal, but it is in a different jurisdiction, which makes any sharing of services very complicated.
"I feel I have the right to be treated in my own country," says Brown.
"Northern Ireland are always going to look after their own first," says John T Quinn from Convoy, co-chairman of DACC. "If they have spare capacity for treatment, it might go to us, but that makes us second best. With two jurisdictions the chain of command is always going to be different."
"We all pay our taxes to the same State, and I don't see why a woman in Donegal with breast cancer should be treated any differently than a woman in Dublin with the same thing," O'Donnell says.
When they organised the rally, they didn't know what the extent of the support in the county would be. "We felt it was a bouncing ball: we didn't know where we were with the campaign," McDevitt explains. "We wanted to see what the depth of feeling was." They were amazed at the size of the turnout - people travelled from all over the county to be there, in numbers equal to the entire population of Letterkenny itself. One dying woman known to them, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer two years previously, got out of her sickbed to march. She was buried this week.
"We would have got nothing from the Government unless we had been proactive and done something about it," Brown believes, "because we're certainly the forgotten county as far as health services go."
DACC has been asked several times if it has any plans to run a candidate in next year's general election: a question to which local politicians are increasingly very keen to know the answer.
"Ask us that question next year. We are not ruling anything in or anything out," says O'Donnell. "But we're doing what we're doing for cancer patients in Donegal, and we know we have a mandate of at least 15,000 people behind us."
"We are a force to be reckoned with," says Brown.
"People power," O'Donnell offers, and they all nod in agreement.
BUT IT'S NOT only the politicians the people of Donegal feel at an immense distance from. It's also tourists from the domestic market. "All you ever hear from people at home about Donegal is how far away it is and how hard it is to get to," complains Sean Óg Kane, who runs the Astoria Wharf, a bar in Bundoran and is on the board of the existing North West Regional Tourism Authority. "Donegal is a little republic all on its own, without any funding."
Like the DACC, he feels that part of the reason Donegal has become known as the Forgotten County is due to the fact that the fastest way to access the county from the State is usually by crossing the Border.
"During the Troubles, people didn't want to do that journey. Now [the Troubles] are over, and people have this perception we're much further away than we are. The Border established in 1922 left us further away from the rest of the country, and the Troubles saw to it that we remained so."
While there are four other counties under the North West Regional Tourism Authority, the people representing Donegal claim that its needs are different to both the rest of the region and to the rest of the country.
"It's very hard to change perceptions," Kane points out. "We need extra funding to promote the county and remind people it's as close to get to from Dublin as it is to get to Kerry or Cork. We feel we're a special case. We keep hearing the Exchequer is so flush with money and we'd like to see some of it come this way. The Northern Ireland Tourist Board has much more money than us."
During the Troubles, Donegal always had cross-Border tourists, which still form the vast majority of the county's market from the island of Ireland. "They usually didn't want to go too far away from their own homes," Kane says. "Now things have settled down, they're going much further south, down the west coast, and we're losing them."
SEAN MCENIFF IS also sitting in Bundoran's Allingham Arms Hotel, talking about tourism. "It's the only industry that the Government can't take away from us or shut down on us." They voted against the new restructuring because "we were being led blindfold on to a plank and being told to make a jump into the unknown".
While they have been personally assured by Minister O'Donoghue that in the next Budget they will get extra funding for promoting tourism, their dilemma now seems to be that they don't know what kind of tourist they're aiming for. The American coach tour market is down, the cross-Border tourists are becoming scarcer, and the domestic market is increasingly opting for short breaks at home, city breaks in Europe, and at least one holiday in the sun per year.
That's a bigger tourism-related problem, and one that Donegal is not alone in facing. "We have a great product but we are the weakest region by a long shot," says McEniff. "But we have to do something about it; we can't be waiting for things to come in the door to us."
Is there a danger that Donegal might now get a reputation among the rest of the country as being not the Forgotten County, but the Whinging County? "We're not whinging," Kane insists smilingly. "We're just looking for our due rights."