Sir, - Fintan O'Toole appears to seek any opportunity to berate farmers and totally misrepresents the role and composition of the Council for the West (Opinion, November 13th).
The Council for the West, for the record, does indeed respect the role of farmers and farming as a vital cog in the machinery which helps to preserve rural Ireland from elimination by Fintan O'Toole's equivalents at policymaking levels in Government.
Mr O'Toole is, of course, right that the cows no longer graze the streets of Sligo, but they might if Sligo and every other town in rural Ireland had not developed with the very substantial commerce created by the existence of their farming and rural hinterlands.
The Council for the West was created to prevent a situation where people like Fintan O'Toole could write: "The truth is that rural Ireland no longer exists". Our council of 21 does have two farmers who represent the single most important economic sector in the West. One of our farmer members is chairman of North Connacht Farmers Co-op, which is providing employment for 1,000 people throughout the rural areas of Connacht - a clear indication of the positive role of farmers and agriculture in this region. We are involved in organisations like Leader, partnership boards, etc., which are geared to developing jobs and economic activity in rural areas. The main thrust of our work this year has been to lead the campaign to retain Objective 1 designation for three rural regions, the West, Border and Midlands.
So Fintan O'Toole wants to play with definitions and statistics as to what constitutes rural Ireland. Try the following definition by Patrick Commins of the Rural Economy Research Centre: "Although it has now become increasingly clear that `agriculture' and `rural' are not synonymous, there is no universally agreed definition of what is meant by `rural areas' or `rural development'." Using an extensive concept of rural areas the Rural Development Policy Advisory Group (1997) accepted as a working definition that all areas of Ireland outside the five major urban centres (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway) were rural. On this basis 74 per cent of the country's population live in rural areas.
A narrower definition is that of the Census of Population which classifies as "rural" all places having a population of 1,500 persons or less. On this criterion, 42 per cent of Irish people live in rural areas, most of them in open country districts. According to the CSO's most recent official figures, there were more people living in rural Ireland in 1996 than in 1991. Of the 1.5 million living in rural Ireland in 1996 just over 1.25 million were living in the countryside or in towns of fewer than 500 people.
Policy driven urbanisation occurs where there is little or no balanced regional development, where there is no significant investment in regional infrastructure and almost no inward investment (Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan have not had a single new start-up of inward investment in the past three years, even though there have been over 14,000 new jobs created in the State this year as a result of new start-ups).
The statement that Ireland is an urban society or that rural Ireland no longer exists, if you say it often enough, becomes "true" - it becomes accepted. All problems then become urban problems and all solutions become urban solutions and if we explain away the existence of 1.5 million people often enough perhaps the devaluers of rural society will ultimately succeed to the detriment of the nation.
Fintan O'Toole asserts that we have a fantasy that by throwing money at rural Ireland it can be preserved - but I can assure him we are not prone to day-dreams. Policies can be put in place to sustain a rural countryside so that people will have a choice to live and work in rural Ireland. The retention of Objective 1 designation is fundamental to this.
We agree with Mr O'Toole that "romantic" rural Ireland may be gone, but what mater if it is replaced by a caring, equitable Ireland of the regions where poverty blackspots in urban and rural areas are at last eradicated by more enlightened Government policies? - Yours, etc.,
Marian Harkin,
Chairperson,
Council for the West,
Market Yard,
Sligo.