Rural depopulation must be fought by imaginative back-to-work schemes and training in new technologies, the new Tipperary Man of the Year, Mr Jim Quigley, has said.
Mr Quigley, national president of Muintir na Tire, the community development organisation, was presented with the award last night. Originally from Toomevara, in north Tipperary, Mr Quigley left behind his farming upbringing to work in the bar trade in Dublin. Later he took early retirement from P & T, the precursor to An Post and Eircom.
As the voluntary full-time president of Muintir na Tire, he is championing issues which were recognised long ago but never adequately acted on. In the 1950s, rural depopulation was seen as a growing problem and the organisation called for the development of larger towns.
"It was ignored by the Government at that stage, but now they are talking about it in the west," he said..
The decline in the number of full-time farmers was also forecast in the 1970s. Now it is estimated the number of farmers will fall from 44,000 to 20,000 within 10 years.
"How it has been handled over the years has not been the best. We talk about having a deficit in our workforce yet we have hundreds, if not thousands, of women who want to get back into the workforce," he said.
"But because they work in rural areas, they do not have access to training programmes which would give them the confidence and the skills to go back to work." The spectre is one of "large tracts of land with nobody living in them" but although the depopulation problem is at its worst, the solution offered by emerging technologies has never been better. "We have the opportunities through telemarketing to stop putting the jobs into the honeypot of the east coast and move them to the country where they can work very well," Mr Quigley said.
He also believes banks have a social responsibility to keep branches open in rural towns, particularly for elderly people.
"We are very much focused,
particularly through the Community Alert scheme, on the elderly, to make sure they do not keep money in rural houses and that they put it into the financial institutions. The financial institutions should be making a greater effort to encourage elderly people."
However, over the past 15 months, an average of one bank branch per month has closed, mostly in western counties.
"This is where the Celtic Tiger has taken us. Everything is down to profits, and the social end of things does not appear to matter any more."