Our Economic Model Has Failed Rural Ireland.
Hyper-capitalism, fading villages and the myth of prosperity—why our rural populations are bleeding out even as some insist all is well.
In his article ‘The choices we make trigger rural decline’ ( Western People, 14 February 2025), Mark Godfrey responded to my earlier documenting of the calamitous loss of western rural communities (‘The Heart Of Another Rural Community Has Stopped Beating…’). While I found his argument kind of wandering all over the place, I think it could be best distilled into one big “get over yourself”.
Godfrey takes a swipe at my claims of rural depopulation by stating that Mayo towns are growing (“Surely these are classed as rural Ireland”). Yet, he gives no figures or trends and ignores the fact that in any case, this is a blunt instrument to indicate all is well in rural Ireland. Every shantytown would thus be a paradise judged by demographic growth alone. We also must look at jobs, age profiles and income levels, along with services such as shops, pubs, restaurants, taxis - as well as the health of sports clubs, etc - to see how towns are really doing. That is for another column.
Looking at Mayo overall, according to the Central Statistics Office, between 2011-2016, the county was a national outlier along with Sligo and Donegal, losing 0.2% in population (*see correction at end). It did grow by 5.2% over the next six years. Yet, this is not the full picture, as Mayo had the lowest level of natural population increase (shared with Kerry) in that later period, with almost twice as many people migrating into the county, accounting for most of the growth. The untold story is the continuing bleeding of our native population, underlying these figures.
Godfrey proudly affirms: “Being hyperactively capitalistic, being the most open economy in the world, has made Ireland a mostly rich land. But this developmental model has always encouraged and demanded urbanisation." He sees this economic policy as a result of successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fail governments, therefore both urban and rural voters are perfectly happy with it all and thus he sees me as engaged in plaintive moaning out in the wilderness. Yet, that assumes the democratic model is working in Ireland – and I argued it wasn’t, which he ignores.
My critic stated that rural populations thrived only under Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s protectionist economy which was “retired by Lemass”. Really? Actually my research underlined how rural North Mayo declined during the de Valera’s years and it was only his under his successor, Séan Lemass, and his partnership with civil servants such as T.K. Whittaker and Todd Andrews, that saw the development of such state-sponsored rural enterprises as the combined Bord na Móna/ESB works at Oweninny.
Rural Ireland thrived under this new departure because of the proactive role of the state in developing Irish resources and communities. It was the much later Neoliberal policies of successive Irish governments that pivoted away from state intervention in social engineering and instead embraced this laissez-faire ‘hyper-capitalism’.
Godfrey believes the ultimate goal of modernisation is to be “adding more in value to the national GDP”. Yet, it is accepted by most economists that we cannot put much value on our published GDP, terming it ‘Leprechaun economics’ - being so monstrously inflated by international profits run through Ireland by enormous corporations such as Facebook or Apple and certainly is not a true reflection of the health of our local economy. He argues for a modern “consensus” which holds that “education, industrialisation and urbanisation held the keys to prosperity”, which blithely ignores his previous statement about our prosperity being the result of us having the most capitalist-friendly economy in the world. Which is it Mark?
Incidentally, it is the Neoliberal, hyper-capitalist, free-trade ‘consensus’ that made China prosperous by selling their products into a hollowed-out, deindustrialised America, whose rural communities abandoned the Democrats and voted for Donald Trump. This same ‘consensus’ has seen climate change and environmental destruction from unchecked urban growth, over-intensive agriculture and factory pollution. This same ‘consensus’ has seen staggering levels of economic inequality coupled with the creation of transnational enterprises and oligarchs where corruption, monopolistic trade practices and unfettered power are rampant. By fawningly going with this ‘consensus’, Ireland has indeed become ‘hyperactively capitalistic’. In doing so, we are unthinkingly denuding our country of so much of its people, culture and landscape.
It is my detractor’s fatalism about all of this that I find most depressing (and again which I wrote about in my original article). He sees losing “local supermarkets, grocers and butchers” as fine because that’s the result of us joining the Single Market and having an Aldi and Lidl in our local town. Shuttering “Irish shops selling food, clothes and hardware” and even closing pubs is okay because county councillors “sought and welcomed” each ‘hyper-competitive multinational beast”. Local people not demanding “state spending on public amenities, transport and social facilities” is honky-dory because we-the-voters have instead “embraced the free market ethos of Irish centrist political parties”.
One of Godfrey’s most strange statements is that essentially nobody wants to live in the countryside except some of the “many immigrants very keen to live in rural Ireland and to work jobs that natives no longer want”. Such jobs as what? Again, what are his sources or figures? He then confirms that rain is wet by saying “farm-raised solicitors, accountants and software engineers went to metropolises like Dublin because that’s where the work was”. But is that saying all rural people want to have “high-paid urban jobs”? And of course, he can’t see the building of an infrastructure to support jobs in the West (high-paid or otherwise) as worthy of a government.
Godfrey’s claim that “universal access to education - an admirable goal - was never going to create generations of rural dwellers seeking to remain in situ” suggests that once people have their eyes opened by schooling and realise a better life is but a plane or boat journey away - where people use knives and forks and don’t spit tobacco - misses the main point of my piece. Of course, some ambitious and restless spirits will always move to where there is greater opportunity but the biggest cause of people leaving rural Ireland, then and now, is suitable employment and housing in social networks where people want to live, raise families and be actively involved in their communities, while experiencing a happy quality of life.
Mark Godfrey is clearly a thoughtful observer and I am glad he engaged with my piece. We need more debate about this existential demographic threat to rural Ireland.
Originally published in the Western People, 11 March 2025
*3 April 2025 — Correction, I originally incorrectly stated that county Mayo lost 2% in population over 2011-2016 but on reflection, the correct figure from the Central Statistics Office is 0.2%. My argument is unaffected, as Mayo is still a national outlier in population decline along with Sligo and Donegal (basically the North-West of Ireland).