The West needs to develop some public parks

Life in the West – in ‘rural’ Ireland – is increasingly urban. Why can we say that? Because life anywhere in Ireland, whether you are in Dublin or Mayo, is increasingly based on Netflix of an evening; living beside neighbours who are more or less unknown and certainly unvisited; and with open fires increasingly rare.

You wouldn’t always know that was the case, though, listening to some of our public debates. Some people still like to talk about the West as though they were describing a scene out of Peig. Usually though – let’s be frank – that’s because their actual purpose in weaving this tale of woe is to complain about some badly needed change in public policy that will cost them money.

The major remaining difference between ‘rural’ and urban Ireland is really distance and how to get from A to B. It is definitely easier to get around Dublin without a car, gridlock notwithstanding, though those Local Link buses that have appeared all over the West are narrowing, if not closing, the gap.

But even allowing for that difference, the reality is that most people in the West of Ireland make their money in an essentially urban way – in manufacturing, in retail, in providing services of one kind or another. And since they make their money that way, they live in an urban way.

A rural way of living comes about when you live in a place where most, or at least a very large portion of people, make their money from rural pursuits. That was us well into the latter part of the 20th century. But those days are gone – and they are not coming back. As we all know, the percentage of total employment in agriculture, forestry and fishing in the West has been in free fall for the last 30 years and it is now well under ten per cent. That’s higher than the rest of the country, of course, but not by all that much.

Of course, that isn’t to say that these rural economic pursuits aren’t still important – they certainly are. The job of growing food and catching fish is a crucial and a hard one. But those who do it don’t make up anything close to the majority of what the West of Ireland does to make a living, and so that rural form of life which derived from our history of farming and fishing no longer determines how the West lives. 

Even farming itself has become more and more urban in the way it is carried out. It is increasingly highly mechanised and specialised. If a business consultant looked at a well-run farm these days, they would note that it operates much like an industrial plant would, essentially using factory methods to turn nitrate drenched grass into meat and milk.

There is some sadness in the loss of that rural way of living, but the hard facts are that we are not economically the poorer for it – quite the opposite. Socially though, we have lost some. For the change in how we make our living means that we are changing many positive things about the way we have lived. Nowadays, kids in the West of Ireland have to be brought to sports and activity camps, even in the height of summer. In times gone by, sports and activity for a child happened outside your door, at all times of the year. Now even the activity of a child must be structured and organised.

The strides that all the brilliant community and sports groups have made to meet this need show that in some areas we have managed this transition to an urban life really well. But the constant calls for capital development monies for sports and activity infrastructure shows that we still have some way to go yet.

Socially, this is more challenging for the older population. Managing the transition for them, raised as they were in that more bonded, rural way of life, is a vital job for all of us. The pattern of rural life of old often hid horrors, as many reports have told, but it also contained solidarity, goodness and neighbourliness. The more of those qualities which can be retained, through listening to the wisdom of the old and following their example, the better this new more urbanised future we will inhabit will be.

Sitting up here in Dublin, I notice a particular gap in the West that will also be important to fill if we want to make that future as good as it can be. Dublin has been an urban area for hundreds of years and is full of parks. Places where anyone can go and walk and cycle and picnic, with paths that don’t demand hiking boots and the vigour of youth. Places where communities and friends can come together and share simple pleasures. Places where everyone can enjoy a beautiful garden or admire old trees or gentle waters.

Everyone who has ever lived in Dublin, or even visited indeed, has their favourite park. Residents also have their much loved local one. Stephen’s Green is famous, but most people who live in Dublin don’t see it as their favourite. That might be St Anne’s Park or Herbert Park or, yes, the Phoenix Park, which is so large you can like particular places within it without knowing them all. In those parts of Dublin which are less developed – there are still some – you will find stately houses and their gardens converted into pleasure gardens for visitors. If you ever get the chance to visit North County Dublin, you will enjoy any number of these, of which Ardgillan and Newbridge are perhaps the two finest. Woe betide anyone in Dublin who disrupts the life of the local park. It is a community facility, a place where urban people can break out of the narrowness of their home life.

There are a number of fine parks in the West, or perhaps I should say, many things that are like parks. Lough Lannagh; Belleek; the grounds of the National Museum in Turlough – we are more likely to have ‘walks’ than ‘parks’. But as we become even more urban in our mindsets and our social patterns, we are going to need more of them – and more that look and operate rather like the parks in Dublin.

All around the region, you can hear the demand for them. Those calls derive from an increasingly urbanised population who want places where people who live in the same community – but not directly beside each other – can express their neighbourliness over a walk. They relate to a desire for places where the whole community can come out and place a successful team up on a bandstand and cheer them to the roof. They reflect a wish for places where older people can meet collectively for a walk and a coffee and fight off the stiffness through smiles. Every community in the West who have been fighting for a public park – my own hometown of Kiltimagh among them – should be encouraged and supported. They are reading the future signs about our home more accurately than the readers of Peig.