Edwin McGreal: Mayo's rural school figures paint a worrying picture

In next June’s local elections, I’ll be voting in the Belmullet/Achill Electoral Area. It is one of the largest geographically in the country. Driving from Dooagh in Achill Island on the area’s extreme west to Carrowteige on its very north will take one hour and 20 minutes.

Yet for all of its vastness, there are only three seats up for grabs because it is also one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country.

There is an inclination to just dismiss this reality as the natural way of things, as something that has always been thus. But, poke behind the covers, and you’ll find the population figures are declining at an alarming rate.

If you really want to test the pulse of an area, then the school figures are a really instructive guide.

Overall figures can be less definitive sometimes. They may mask that there may be a large elderly population – as is the case on Achill Island – and obscure the reality that there are not near as many young families calling this place home or, for that matter, young graduates right out of college. Fast forward a generation or two and you will see huge drops in the total population.

Across the whole electoral area – the schools in all of Erris, the parish of Achill and Mulranny National School - there are 1,073 children across 25 national schools. Go back 30 years to 1994 when the Celtic Tiger was just starting to roar and the population of the schools in the area was almost double – 2,135. Oh, how little that economic prosperity hit the northwest of Mayo.

That halving in the numbers of national school children is a seismic fall and is something we should not be sleepwalking through. Narrow the focus into different areas and you see some areas hit particularly hard. In the parish of Kiltane in 1994 there were 336 children in its three national schools – Bangor Erris, Geesala and Doohoma. Thirty years on, that figure is exactly one-third, just 112 children.

In Cill Chomáin parish it is 39% of what it was 30 years ago (from 411 down to to 161). In Ballycroy, it is 37% (from 112 down to 41) and down from three schools to two with the closing of Shranamonragh NS. In Achill, it is down 46%, from 467 to 215 children, and four schools have closed – Bullsmouth, Currane, Derreens and Bunacurry.

Mulranny is an outlier, up slightly from 68 children to 73 while across a larger base, Belmullet has taken a relatively low hit, the schools in the parishes of Belmullet and Kilmore Erris now at 64% of the 1994 figures, down from 741 to 471. There are similar trends across north Mayo parishes like Ballycastle, Lacken and Kilfian.

The declining numbers are becoming apparent on the Gaelic football fields of Mayo. Kiltane and Ballycroy are now amalgamated at underage. Naomh Padraig, the amalgamation of Killala, Lacken, Kilfian and Ballycastle covers a vast swathe of north Mayo but population is the only currency of note and those numbers have fallen sharply. Others will have to follow suit.

Of course, we have smaller family sizes nowadays but when you look across the county, you see some striking contrasts. The population of schools in Castlebar and Westport have grown slightly while the growth is more pronounced in towns in the south of the county like Ballinrobe and Claremorris.

Claremorris has seen national school numbers climb by 14% in that time, from 636 to 724. In Ballinrobe, there is a staggering 37% increase from 388 in 1994 to 532 now. Why are Claremorris and Ballinrobe receiving the biggest bounces? Families certainly are not more fertile in the south of the county! 

Proximity to Galway and also to the Tuam to Galway and Galway to Dublin motorway are key factors. As the leading economist John Bradley, a former research professor with the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), has pointed out, there is a north-south divide in the county.

Proximity to Castlebar, Galway and even Dublin has helped South Mayo. Ballina and Sligo simply do not have the same economic gravitational pull of a Castlebar or Galway.

And yet we know that the entire northwest region has been downgraded in classification by the European Union as a ‘lagging region’, the only such area in the country. We know the east coast has a major advantage when it comes to infrastructural spending, economic opportunities and population growth. So if this region is the poor relation and then you see south Mayo relatively thriving compared to the north-west of the county, you realise how much this region has been left behind.

Job opportunities are not nearly as plentiful. There is insufficient positive discrimination to counterbalance the hegemony of the east coast. This laissez-faire attitude has contributed significantly to the housing crisis our country is in.

Many people from these parts of Mayo would love to remain at home but, despite the greater access to working-from-home opportunities since Covid, it just isn’t the panacea some have made it out to be. Fundamentally there is an acceleration towards urbanisation and a lack of a spatial strategy that will ensure balanced regional development. Rural living is quite simply discouraged by official Ireland. For instance, the inability of many children from rural Ireland to get planning permission to build in their home communities is accelerating the trend of urbanisation.

Development has to be sustainable and responsible. But it also ought to take account of our traditions and culture when it comes to living. Rural life is a huge part of Irish life and always has been.

I recall speaking to Éamon Ó Cuív before on this and his comments always resonated when he referenced Garrymore in south Mayo. Anyone familiar with the GAA club there will know how thriving that rural hamlet has been.

“Garrymore is a very typical rural community with a very strong GAA club. The country is full of Garrymores … If we don’t allow regeneration of the generations, the only people that will be left there are old people.

“These are successful parishes … A lot of Irish geography is based on the townland and the parish, the civil parish, the county and the province. Try change the county boundary in this country and you will know all about it.

“So that’s a different geography than what the planners look at so you have two conflicting geographies in this country, the other being the more European geography which is being imposed on us which I disagree with.

“When people say to me, ‘It’s a European norm’, I say ‘I don’t live in Europe. I live in Ireland’. I don’t care what they do in France. I’m not going to be dictated to because their social history is totally different than ours,” he said.

I’m sure there are holes to be picked in his arguments, but for those of us familiar with such successful communities, it is something worth striving for. It ought to be thoughtful and considerate. There are plenty of examples of bad planning around the country but perhaps if we decide to have a starting point of a spatial strategy that we have something worth preserving in rural Ireland and work towards sustainable ways of doing it, rather than accelerating urbanisation, we might hold onto something intrinsic to us. It’s not too late. In a generation’s time it may well be.

Slowly and steadily so many communities across Mayo are dying on their feet. Schools are closing, so too are post offices, shops, and pubs. Those still open are often under huge pressure to keep the wolf from the door.

What are the solutions?