SOME local authorities use housing estates to hide rural poverty, creating ghettos on the edge of towns, a conference was told in Cork yesterday.
Mr Trutz Hasse, a social and economic consultant, told the Rural Development and Social Exclusion Conference that people without land and former farm labourers gravitated to public housing outside the main urban complexes.
The housing estates established by councils had been, to some extent, ghettoised by virtue of their location outside the central areas of small towns, he said.
"The estate as a ghetto may mean that, in contrast to the town itself where all members live on the street or small complex of streets that make up the town, the poor live somewhere else, invisible and apart from the town."
This was similar to the way in which travellers had been subjected to the "not in my backyard" attitude when seeking halting sites. "So also those in local authority housing have located in estates that are frequently marginal and effectively invisible to the townscape of which they form one part", Mr Hasse said.
Two by no means exceptional examples of this were the areas of public housing in Skibbereen, Co Cork, and Rathdrum, Co Wicklow.
He told the conference that rural poverty was more invisible than its urban counterpart for a number of reasons, and it was widely accepted that 20-30 per cent of the Irish population was in some sense economically poor.
Rural Ireland has a residential pattern different to other European countries. The rural landscape was seen as a consumption product for tourists and to meet the leisure needs of the urban population.
"The prettiness of the rural scene belies the reality of what it depicts and, from the point of view of the beholder, many of the features such as old, cold and inadequate housing, isolation and separation from services and amenities and the reliance on outmoded forms of transport, all may appear as part of a rural heritage threatened by modernisation," he said.
Mr Chris McInerney, of the Community Workers' Co operative, said the EU did not have a policy to eliminate rural poverty.