"Galway's copywriters have succeeded in selling the city as a centre of the arts, a Celtic-cum-cultural Mecca, a vibrant industrial cell. Their press statements say little about the desertification of much of rural Connaught, the latent delinquency in sprawling suburbs, the visionless merchants.
"The west doesn't need a little Dublin. It needs life in its small towns, from Castlerea to Westport to Tuam to Portumna. A balanced urbanisation more in keeping with a Clonmel, a Tralee or a Donegal. Caught up in its own rhetoric, a victim of its own image-making, Galway could sober itself with a short drive around town . . . "
With such rhetoric, the Irish language-monthly, Cuisle, has forecast in its current issue that Galway, dubbed Europe's fastest-growing city, will become one of Europe's ugliest in coming years, with all the problems attached to an "incohesive agglutination" in terms of planning.
Long-term unemployment is also a problem in the so-called "boom town". Acknowledging this, the Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Ms Harney, gave her support to a Galway City Partnership initiative last week.
The local employment service network (LESN), established by the Galway City Partnership, was announced last September and some 450 clients have registered to date. So far, 23 per cent of clients have been placed in employment, 19 per cent are on community employment schemes and 2 per cent have returned to full-time education.
The network adopts a personal and informal approach and is staffed by a mediator and information worker. Four centres have been established in Galway - at Westside, Ballybane, on Nun's Island and in Forster Street. Commenting on recent criticism by the European Social Fund (ESF) evaluation unit of partnerships and community groups, the Tanaiste said the EU could often tend to be very "criteria-orientated" when assessing schemes.
The ESF said the groups had failed to influence policy at national level, had devoted relatively little of their resources to the long-term unemployed and had sometimes served no interests other than their own. The Tanaiste said her own experience of partnerships was "fantastic", and they had worked very well with the long-term unemployed.