Ann Phelan, Minister of State for Rural Development, is not in charge of “rural” in the sense of agricultural or countryside development. She is charged rather with the rescue and development of damaged and threatened towns and their hinterlands. A Dublin habit, government and mass media combined, is to speak of the Republic as consisting of Dublin and “rural Ireland” regardless not only of other cities, but also of scores of towns.
The Minister’s priority will be the towns severely damaged, materially and psychologically, in the lifetime of the present Government by a combination of closures of Garda stations, post offices and national schools; the abolition of town councils; the granting of planning permissions to scattered rural houses and to shopping centres outside towns; and the failure to fulfil promises to provide countrywide broadband.
Going further back, there was the damage done to the pub business and therefore social life of towns by the severe restriction on driving after the consumption of alcohol without the provision of adequate public transport in the surrounding countryside.The recent abolition of all town councils means the Minister and her civil servants are deprived of an accredited interlocutor in the towns. For advice and implementation they are dependent on themselves and random consultants. The elected town councillors, even if virtually powerless, would have been the people best informed about the circumstances of their respective towns as well as persons directly interested in their repair or development.
Of course, that fact raises the question of why town councils, adequately empowered and funded, are not in charge of the repair or, as the case may be, development of their towns. Such councils would seem to be the most effective carers for towns hitherto insufficiently cared for. Indeed, it seems that Phil Hogan, when he was minister in charge of local government, originally had something of the sort in mind: town councils with considerable powers and in charge also of the surrounding rural hinterlands.
‘Centres of life’
In an address in 2011 to the Association of Municipal Authorities of Ireland he argued for this as follows: “Towns are centres of life not only for the ever-increasing numbers who live in them but also for the much wider population who look particularly to urban centres for the social, public service, recreational, commercial, professional, educational and other requirements of their daily lives . . . The watering down of town council powers needs to be reversed.”
But subsequently the centralising orthodoxy of the Civil Service reined him in to the degree of abolishing town councils entirely. That orthodoxy, in power since the foundation of the Irish State, when it abolished most of the existing local councils of various kinds, has as its script something like this: “The Irish are not capable of governing themselves in their urban communities as other European urban communities do. Best, ideally, that we manage everything for them. But, given that the British left us democratically elected local authorities, if that ideal solution is impractical, at least we can prevent any local democratic madness by installing persons of our own sort as the executive managers of the councils.”
This disrespectful, anti-Irish orthodoxy was challenged notably in the late 1960s and the 1970s by a movement of new thinking and writing led by a career civil servant Tom Barrington, first director of the newly-founded Institute of Public Administration. Along with Des Roche, Basil Chubb, Charles McCarthy and others I was privileged to play a part in that movement. Its humanistic aim, inspired by respect for Irish human and citizen dignity and communal life, was to replace the existing Irish system of local government with a system in line with European norms – "truly local and truly part of government", with ample devolved powers; adequate local financing; the local community in effective charge of its own life and circumstances. It included district self-government based on towns. Barrington believed that More Local Governments (1970), the report of an Institute working group chaired by Chubb, outlined what was needed. After a subsequent series of government-instigated reports and implemented readjustments, in 1992, eight years before his death, Barrington pronounced local government to have been in a state of "false pregnancy since 1971". The centralist orthodoxy had won out again.
I recall this effort so that those sharing its values will know, if they don't already, that such an effort was made and that its arguments and proposals exist in its reports and books, especially Barrington's From Big Government to Local Government and The Irish Administrative System and in his articles in the Institute's journal Administration.
Local government
Now again in the latest bout of reductive juggling with Irish local government the entrenched bureaucratic orthodoxy has won out. Among other disrespectful measures, the responsible minister was persuaded that the best way to deal with the repair or development of the Republic’s towns was, first, to implement the abolitional ideal with regard to their elected councils; second, to put in charge of the matter, from Donegal and Kerry to Wexford and Louth, a bright new Minister of the second degree and her attendant civil servants, located in her Dublin office. Dr Desmond Fennell’s latest book is
Third Stroke Did It: The Staggered End of European Civilisation
. desmondfennell.com