Rural Ireland will always have mixed feelings about Dublin

Be sure you are taking your ease when you read this: a new report from KPMG last week estimated that Dublin requires a €70bn investment in infrastructure by 2040. Why do West of Ireland people need to be sitting down when they read that? Because talking about investment in Dublin produces a weakness west of the Shannon.

You can hear the reaction. Dublin needs €70 billion? For what? For infrastructure? Sure isn’t everything already in Dublin? No politician – who is not from Dublin – can speak too openly and positively about Dublin and its needs, however worthy and necessary they may be. Which political leader would stand up at a meeting of their national conference, and proudly state that Dublin needs billions of investment over the next dozen years or so and that they will get it? No, that’s not a winner.

Dublin has a strange and strained relationship with the rest of Ireland. That has been true ever since the Vikings founded it. The greatest victory story from Ireland’s history is Brian Boru trying to conquer the city, or at the very least teach it a lesson. That relationship with the rest of the country got even more complicated once the Normans built the Castle on the city’s highest spot – and plenty of things happened in the centuries afterwards to make the rest of the country look on Dublin with suspicion.

Back in the days of the British, when we were a predominately agricultural society, Dublin was the agent for governing – holding down even – the rest of the country. The only thing that came out of Dublin was orders and policemen, often described in shorthand as ‘the Castle’. Supplying information there made you that most terrible of things: an informer.

The development of nationalism in late 19th century Ireland was also built around a sense that Dublin – and many of its people – was foreign, alien, at odds with the Irish national ideal. There was a feeling that the people in Dublin – the people inside the Pale – were in some sense the hirelings of the British, their agents of dominance over the rest of Ireland.

You can see then why so many nationalist noses were out of joint when Dublin was the only significant place to rise in 1916. Many rural nationalists couldn’t quite believe that it was the Pale that rose. But that thought should be tempered by the reality that most Dublin citizens were horrified by the Rising, a dominant feeling that was countered first by the shooting of the leaders, and subsequently – and perhaps to an even greater degree – by the threat of extending conscription into the British Army to Ireland.

This idea of the capital and main city being an alien place to the rest of the country isn’t remotely unique to us. Small countries across Europe that were historically dominated by bigger neighbours had similar feelings about big cities in their midst that went on to become their capitals. Across Europe, those feelings led to the idea that the rural ideal was the only genuine nationalism, an attitude personified and articulated here by de Valera, and many others. The capital was urban, and urban was foreign.

And yet, isn’t it a bit strange that the Irish continue to feel this way, more than 100 years after Michael Collins marched in – seven minutes late – and took control of Dublin Castle?

Dublin is not a capital like Washington DC, a place that exists more or less to provide a home for the federal government. Dublin is also not really like London. In large parts of northern England for example, London is a very distant place. Dublin on the other hand is frequently visited by people from all over Ireland, and it is full of people from rural Ireland. Joyce said it was a good puzzle to cross Dublin without passing a pub. In my experience, it would be harder to cross Dublin and meet someone who could trace all their grandparents to the city. Dublin is full of culchies, this correspondent proudly amongst them.

People in the West often have a contradictory set of views about Dublin: that it is both full of the very best and the very worst, all at once.

An observer once spotted an example of this in the shopping experience. People from the West come shopping in Dublin to Grafton Street and Moore Street and they think that the commercial life of Dublin is booming. And while noting that, they will at the same time conjure up all sorts of ways you can get robbed while you’re there.

The reality is of course rather different. Head into the individual areas and villages that make up Dublin, and you will find that shops are closing and very few of the traditional retail units are surviving, for the very same reasons they are challenged in the West. In Dublin, as in Mayo, people get in their car, drive out of their immediate neighbourhood, and spend all their money in rectangle boxes on the outskirts, or they stay at home and shop on Amazon. And then, in wonderment or bafflement or anger, we all complain – rural and urban alike – about the small shops closing.

Not even Grafton or Henry Street are immune from this anymore. Walk down those streets today and you will see a thing I have not seen in 30 years here: closed-up premises.

Aside from the history, the tension between west and east also has a simpler and more human explanation, one that makes the outrage when it’s suggested that the capital needs investment more understandable. Dublin is where the action is, where you go when you’re young to make your mark. And if you do go back, you go after you reach a certain stage, to go home to settle down, when the quieter stage of life is on you. So Dublin siphons off the young and energetic – and who wouldn’t be a little bit cross about that, and wonder why that place up there needs all the money too?

There is a story my father tells about a lady many moons ago who stood on the train platform, waiting for her daughter to get on the steam train which would take her away into a life of exile. The older lady looked up at the engine, preparing for departure by building up its steam, and remarked, ‘Bad cess to you smoky hole.’ For many in the West, Dublin remains a bit of a smoky hole, into which many of our most precious things disappear.