Dr. Karen Keaveney:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and the committee for the invitation this morning. I am Dr. Karen Keaveney, and I am an assistant professor of rural development in the University College Dublin, UCD school of agriculture and food science, and a founding member of the UCD Centre for Irish Towns. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on and discuss with members the findings of Creating our Future which are pertinent to this commitment.

Based on my own experiences as a rural geographer and planner, and on the calls in Creating our Future, I would like to highlight three key principles. These are the need to establish a strong evidence basis for policy and decision-making in rural places; recognition that there is innovation in community engagement; and that there is, and should be, benefit from the research we do in universities for policy and communities. All of these three points are underpinned by taking a place-based approach which has people at its centre, where we work from the bottom up through partnership and collaboration.

The approach called for in Creating our Future, and the research that we do in UCD rural development and the UCD Centre for Irish Towns, is framed around these key issues. We are passionate about the role that towns can play in the sustainable development of their rural localities. Although we come from a range of disciplines, what holds us together is that community and citizens are placed at the centre of our research. We work with communities to design research, so that there is a positive legacy from projects. This ensures benefits which outlive projects and which can inform policy. Our approach is around the idea of coming together to address issues which matter to people and places. It is a contemporary meitheal, in some sense, which sees partnership between third level researchers and communities in various localities.

In our work, we have identified the need for strong evidence to support decision-making. For example, in the Irish Research Council, IRC Collaborative Alliances for Societal Challenges, COALESCE-funded project, Citizen Rural - which is based in County Roscommon - we are exploring what data is important to understand the dynamics of a changing rural Ireland, and how citizens can use and engage with this data in an accessible way. This project involved our local partners, Roscommon LEADER partnership and Roscommon County Council, together with the Department of Rural and Community Development, from the beginning in the design stage. That really was crucial.

Central also to my own research, and to that of my colleagues, is that there are innovative ways of engaging communities that need to be recognised. In the GeoWestCoast project, funded by IRC New Foundations, we documented the ways in which three west coast communities created plans for their villages.

This was in Cromane and Asdee in County Kerry and Mulranny in County Mayo. It captured and facilitated peer learning for the communities. We have developed an online resource that can be used by other communities to learn more about community planning and geodesign. As one of the participants said during interviews, "By doing a community-led plan, we are now taken seriously by the county council and have evidence to make informed submissions and to apply for funding for projects in the village." Sharing these stories and experiences is the responsibility of academics so that we can facilitate wider benefits to community groups and other interested groups.

Listening to people reflecting on successes and failures, learning from each other and understanding that each rural place, village and town is different and has its own strengths are what community development is about. For me and my colleagues in UCD, rural research is about embodying the philosophy of rural community development, which is about taking a place-based approach in partnership with communities and policymakers and understanding opportunities and challenges from the bottom up. This is strongly reflected in the citizen-led call in Creating Our Future.