This report is potentially important — the topic certainly is. We debate matters such as rural development fairly frequently in this Chamber. I recall the long discussion we had on A Crusade for Survival, the bishops' report on saving the west. One sometimes wonders if it makes a blind bit of difference because little cognisance seems to be taken of points made. One wonders if we are just talking to ourselves.
I listened with great interest to what both Senators Dardis and Neville said. It is on precisely this sort of topic that Members of the Oireachtas have insights based on personal knowledge of a type that I and many of the experts who compile and pronounce on these reports do not have and which is potentially illuminating for policy purposes. I have learnt a good deal this afternoon from listening to them. I hope cognisance will be taken by policy makers of a number of the points made.
I welcome the NESC report partly because one could have said that the western bishops' document was a vested interest document compiled by people living in the west who were simply proposing measures which would benefit themselves and would say what they said anyway. If one examines the composition of NESC, one finds that it is an almost totally Dublin-based body. It is therefore particularly encouraging that it has come out so strongly in favour of sustaining and developing rural Ireland. Particular cognisance should be taken of that. This cannot be said to represent the vested interest of the majority of its members. It must derive from a degree of intellectual conviction which is independent of individual or institutional interest. Particular attention should be paid to it.
I agree with Senator Neville that this is not a problem of rural Ireland but a national problem. The basic problem is that we have shown we cannot cope with a population of 3.5 million people. For a long time after independence our population hovered around 3 million while the population of the rest of Europe was rising on a steady upwards trajectory. We persuaded ourselves that if our population would rise, it would reflect some sort of injection of national virility and create a larger market which would be self-sustaining.
Between 1970 and 1990 when the population began to rise by that staggering figure of 0.5 million — the size of a self-respecting London suburb — we found that rather than being an opportunity, it was a problem. We began to blame unemployment and other problems on our population growth which was, most unsportingly, out of synch with the rest of Europe which was levelling off. We still have one of the sparsest populations in Europe. Quite frankly the record of the last 20 years is that we do not have the managerial capacity in this country to cope with a population of 3.5 million people. It does not matter what growth rates we have or what we say about being the leading light of the European economy, we simply cannot cope with that population.
Structural population decline is the essence of the definition of the rural problem. Population decline becomes self-sustaining because the core of the community is broken. Outer migration of people in the productive age groups leaves one with the young and the old and there is no viability left in the community. Even though it has elements of the urban problem and parts of the solutions are similar, the rural problem is not essentially one of unemployment. According to the official statistics, there is higher unemployment in many of the worst hit suburban areas in Ireland than there is in rural Ireland.
The problems of Coolock, Darndale, Gurranebraher or Southill in unemployment terms are statistically worse than the problems even of Leitrim which we take as the paradigm of everything that can go wrong in rural Ireland. Places such as Coolock and Darndale are not suffering structural population decline. Those communities are not going to wither away because of the problems they have. Structural population decline is in progress over most of rural Ireland outside of a few counties towards the east and is the essential difference between rural and urban problems.
I have one question for the Minister. It struck me on looking at the albeit illuminating maps in the NESC report that they stop at the Border. What is the situation in Northern Ireland? Is rural Northern Ireland suffering similar problems? The population density of Northern Ireland is about double that of the South. If we had the same population density as the North, we would have a population of about 7 million. We can imagine how we would cope with that if we cannot cope with 3.5 million. I regret that the lines in the Northern Ireland statistics office were down this morning in this age of information technology which some see as the solution to all our problems.
I had a quick glance at such data as I was able to get my hands on relating to Fermanagh and Tyrone, just across the Border. The information in the statistics publication which came to hand is presented in a singularly unhelpful manner. In Fermanagh and Tyrone, four of the five district council areas of Cookstown, Dungannon, Fermanagh, Omagh and Strabane, with a population of over 210,000, experienced an increase in population between 1981 and 1991. There may be variations within it that are not captured here. Only the district council area of Strabane fell from over 36,000 to 35,500 which is less than a 2 per cent decline.
The other areas in Fermanagh and Tyrone, rural counties on the far side of the Border which may be presumed to be suffering to some extent from the types of problems we are only too familiar with on this side of the Border, all showed an increase. They were not big increases — 2 or 3 per cent over that decade. I deduce from that rightly or wrongly — those with more detailed information can correct me — that these counties are not suffering the type of structural population decline which we have identified as the essence of the rural problem in the South. It would be useful if some research was done by people down here on what is happening there and if the deduction is correct. If they are not suffering the identical problem, what are they doing that we might be able to learn?
While our statistical abstract gives data on Northern Ireland, very often it is not in a form which is easily comparable for deducing policy implications. I am grateful the information is there but it would be nice if we had a more policy oriented presentation of relevant data. It would be interesting to keep that dimension in mind.
The report reinforces Senator Neville's point that we have no settlement policy in this State. We have a rural development policy where rural development is isolated from national policy. Many of the reasons for our failure to cope with the problems of rural Ireland are similar to the reasons for our failure to cope with many of the problems in urban Ireland. There are recommendations in the report about institutional developments and the difficulty in co-ordinating numerous bodies whether they be State, non-State, community, local. EU supported and so on. Those self same problems arise in most urban areas. The same problem of coordination arises whether it is in rural or urban Ireland.
The report contains a devastating vote of no confidence in our local authorities. It basically says that our local authorities are not competent to be entrusted with responsibility for discharging, as the central co-ordinating agencies, the types of policy recommended in the report. I do not know whether that is justified. I listened to Senator Neville saying that the local authorities ought to be more central to development. If the vote of no confidence in our local authorities as possible engines of local development is justified then it is a frightening indictment not only of local government but of central Government because local government in this country is largely what central Government has made it. Local government is the product of the powers that central Government has taken away from it and of the way central Government has chosen to organise and repress it.
I do not doubt that there may be many things wrong with local government but if one is serious about energising local communities and if one wants to take this fashionable word "empowerment" seriously then one has to ask how one restores confidence in local government. How does one give it the powers which allow it to act effectively and responsibly? How can one expect people to act responsibly if they are not given real responsibility to exercise? This is a lacuna in the report, which seems to take the inadequacies of our local government system as given and virtually beyond human redemption.
Although there is talk year in, year out about reform of local government, with reports on various aspects, it must be a central part of an overall strategy for the long term rejuvenation of all Ireland, not just rural Ireland. Strategy is a much misused word, but it must not be regarded as a problem. How does one turn a problem into an opportunity? It is a very large programme and it will not be done by one or several Governments. However, if there is not a long term objective and determination to do this, it will not happen at all. A great deal of recommendations about rural or urban development, including Dublin itself, will be about how we circumvent the existing official structure of Government, rather than how we utilise it effectively. This is a sad commentary on the way we choose to manage our affairs.
I agree with Senator Neville that a stop should be put on closures of small institutions in rural Ireland. The report stresses emphatically what many of us have repeatedly said and which is self evident, that most of our Government planning is done in sectors. Government is organised in sectors and Departments are organised around sectors. However, nobody lives in a sector; we all live in places.
There are very few mechanisms for co-ordinating the parallel activities of sectors. An Post will close the small post office, the Department of Education will close the small school and the Department of Justice will close the small Garda station. Within their own terms of reference and the tunnel vision with which they operate, they are perfectly justified in doing so on accounting grounds, not even on economic grounds, which are often myopic or short term.
As long as Cabinet allows these to be the terms of reference of those Departments, they will continue to proceed along those lines. There must be a policy decision that Cabinet is not prepared to accept that criterion if one is concerned with revitalising rural and urban communities. The question of the viability of communities must be a central concern and criterion and all these proposals should be subject to proofing. There is now gender proofing of many committees and correctly so. We should have community viability proofing of recommendations which taken in isolation may seem justifiable, but when added up simply subvert the viability and squeeze the life from them, even though nobody actually intends it. I urge the Minister to try to have as a central plank of Government policy that the overall implications for the viability of the communities affected, whether they are villages, parishes or small towns, should be a central criterion in the evaluation of any such decisions.
I strongly support the emphasis placed on settlement policy by this report. There is no national settlement policy and there is a very skewed distribution of population between the capital city and the rest of the country. I am not speaking against the capital city because there is as much powerlessness in large areas of Dublin, within a couple of miles of this building, as there is in the most remote parts of Ireland.
The only other country in the EU which has such a top heavy capital city in demographic and power terms is Greece. To the best of my knowledge, Athens and its greater area is the only other city in the EU whose proportion of total national population comes anywhere near the proportion of national population accounted for by the greater Dublin area. This is not an anti-Dublin statement, but it means that we face a specific type of problem in this country in terms of settlement policy.
There has been one settlement policy. By locating the headquarters of virtually every State body in Dublin, we automatically suck in all the resources attached to that type of location in terms of finance, support agencies, consultancies and power decisions, which are taken from a Dublin-centric perspective, however inadvertently. I may be wrong in the precise figures but there are approximately 86 State or semi-State agencies, of which 81 have their headquarters in Dublin. I was looking at the figures for Stockholm the other day and there are approximately 83 Swedish bodies, of which 41 have their headquarters in Stockholm.
If 40 Irish semi-State or State agencies had headquarters properly located in areas to which they are most relevant around the country, one can imagine the difference it would make to a number of local areas. An Bord Bia and a Marine Institute were recently established in Dublin when there were strong claims for them to go elsewhere in terms of the part of the State which is most actively concerned with them.
There is an interesting section in the report on information technology and one should not exaggerate its potential for rejuvenating rural Ireland or the way in which it can reduce distance. In terms of decision making centres, there is no reason why agency after agency must cluster beside one another in order to arrive at coherent decisions, even if they were co-ordinating their policies, which most of them do not. I argue strongly that we need a settlement policy, devised at national level.
What role can the education system in general and locally play in energising people to think about local development, whether rural or urban? What role can the universities in particular play in inducing potential policy makers to think in area terms rather than sectoral terms? One reason why we operate sectoral policies is that almost all the people working in those departments, in so far as there are an increasing number of graduates, come from departments and universities which are also organised on a sectoral basis. For example, there are departments of economics, sociology, politics and public administration, all of which deal with some aspect of national problems. However, none sees Ireland whole or from the point of view of integrated policy making.
If one looks at any reports which are published, "integrated" is now one of the most fashionable words in our vocabulary. It is nearly as fashionable as "strategic". When one cannot think of something to say, one shoves in "strategic". There are no plans, just strategic plans. On one page of the National Development Plan, the word "strategic" occurred six times and it meant precisely nothing every single time. One is in trouble it one has a strategic plan, but one is in real trouble if one has an integrated strategic plan because it means that one doubly does not know what one is talking about or how to do it.
Integration is, of course, necessary when there is so much fragmentation in policy making, but how to integrate is another matter. It is left to individuals who have no personal experience, rather than being educated in concepts of integration or working in institutions which foster integration. There ought to be encouragements and inducements available to some of our institutions of higher education to set up courses which try to teach potential policy makers how to think in integrated terms, without them simply having to pick this up as they go along, if they ever pick it up.
This will not solve everything. One cannot teach many things, which have to be picked up in real life outside. However, much of this is a question of mind set and a silent assumption that one does not interrogate oneself about. Rural and any other type of development should be asking what is the potential within the education system for inducing the type of approach which will be more conducive to what we are all trying to achieve. I am loathe to say it, but I fear the initiative for this must come from the State because within the university sector we too think in sectoral terms.
