AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
If Ireland was placed on a weighing scale it would be demographically unbalanced enough to tip us off into the Irish Sea. A whopping 40% of the population are on the East Coast, with over 28% in Dublin. A minority live in smaller communities and the rest in large cities like Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford.
The results are predictable, with congestion, high house prices, and pressure on services, hospitals and schools in cities, with citizens paying the cost in hours spent fuming in commuter traffic or trying to find school places or crèches for children.
Isn’t it time, especially with the benefits of IT and WFH (working from home), to reverse the citified trend and encourage people to move out of big urban centres and take advantage of greener pastures and lower prices?
This is what the Regional and Rural Rebalancing and Our Rural Future schemes are designed to do, aiming to ensure that 50% of population growth goes to places outside our five main cities by 2040. Unlike previous resettlement initiatives, it isn’t directed at individuals but involves a number of different schemes to make smaller communities more attractive to prospective homebuyers.
Initiatives include the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund, the Town and Village Renewal Scheme, the Outdoor Recreation Infrastructure Scheme, the CLÁR Programme (funding for depopulated areas), the Connected Hubs Scheme and the Local Improvement Scheme. And for houses and buildings there are the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grants and the Croí Cónaithe Town Fund.
As far as the latter schemes go, anyone watching Maggie Molloy’s popular Cheap Irish Homes on RTÉ can see there are bargains waiting to be snapped up down the country. Even if you don’t want to take on a doer-upper for under €200,000 or even under €100,000, a look on Daft.ie reveals lower prices for new builds in small towns and villages.
So there are encouraging schemes, but do they actually result in a move away from the cities? It can be a bit difficult to gauge their effect on the ground. A recent report suggests that in some areas population growth is driven more by internal migration than by natural population increase. With previous schemes dealing with individuals, this was much easier to calculate.
The Rural Resettlement charity, which ended in 2023, relocated more than 800 inner-city families to the West, and the 2003 decentralisation scheme moved a third of the intended 10,000 civil servants from Dublin to the counties before the scheme had to be dropped following the crash in 2011. Having done follow-up features on families who resettled, I can remember reporting on the enthusiasm of some public servants at being back in their home areas with a better quality of life, or the delight of a young woman from the inner city who had pulled her first calf, helped by the purchase given by her stiletto heels.
So what is actually happening on the ground locally? “Where the infrastructure is right there is certainly demand in smaller centres like Thomastown,” comments Peter McCreery, property surveyor with Sherry FitzGerald McCreery, Kilkenny. “People are looking outside of cities to smaller towns which give a more balanced lifestyle. But some of the smaller centres lack infrastructure and are at capacity.”
Daft.ie lists just over 100 properties for sale in Co. Kilkenny, the majority recent builds, but expanding housing stock without services like water, drainage or electricity available just isn’t on.
Maybe a targeted approach for selected small towns, on a smaller scale than Athlone’s Green City Master Plan, might help with rebalancing. A first step in attracting people to Athlone’s future sustainable 15-minute city will be to upgrade infrastructure and redevelop land. Interestingly, this is not a Government initiative but a plan by developer Ballymore and their chairperson, Sean Mulryan, in partnership with the Technological University of Shannon.
Once infrastructure is in place, centres are more likely to attract developers and businesses for future employers. There is a wealth of knowledge about a reimagined Ireland to draw on when identifying specific centres for relocation. Attracting individuals and families to relocate seems to have worked in the past, so why not try incentivising a move with a grant? Businesses might be persuaded to move too.
Before anything else, though, the horse has to come first; homes are needed, and before homes, the crucial creation of infrastructure.
