James Bannon (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This Government is reforming the delivery of our local and community development agenda, a process that has been greatly needed for a number of years. We had a stale system and now we need a more joined-up approach to the delivery of supports and services to local communities in the context of reducing resources. Over the years and particularly since we joined the EU, rural Ireland's farms, villages and towns have increasingly lost autonomy. The face-to-face human interaction is nearly gone with the co-ordinates of community nearly a thing of the past. A wide range of factors have caused the diminishing of local communities, such as the ban on turf cutting. Post offices, police stations, small schools and many other central aspects of vibrant local life are being centralised, with even water services being centralised under Irish Water.

At the root of the profound malaise in Irish society is, as the first director of the Institute of Public Administration the late Tom Barrington identified back in 1992, the "civic deficit" in Ireland which involves the leaching away of people power in its transfer to the power hoarders of central government. The civic deficit is not a single thing; it is the accumulation of the deficits and the liabilities over the assets in our civic culture. The civic culture contains in itself a number on intertwining subcultures, the civic, the democratic, the institutional and the moral. At the root of this civic deficit is our very impoverished view of what it means to be an Irish citizen. It is, therefore, a very challenging task to analyse and combat the causes of the malaise in Irish local communities and in our bounded places, those places in which we feel known and know, where we experience connection and draw nourishment, where we feel at home and from which we have something to offer the wider world because the universal truths concerning humankind are to be discovered in the local and the parochial.

In this task, Leader boards and Leader funding are vitally important and relevant. Last April, the Taoiseach launched a new report entitled, Energising Ireland's Rural Economy, by the Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas. The commission is chaired by Mr. Pat Spillane and was established in 2012 to make recommendations on ways to revive rural Ireland. It showed that Irish towns and villages and their rural hinterlands have never before been under such threat. We need debate and action for rural Ireland which needs to look at itself and to see what it can do to stem the tide of decline. In rural towns and villages 100 Garda stations, 200 banks, 100 schools and 1,300 pubs have closed. In addition to these closures, emigration and unemployment have contributed much to rural decline with organisations like the GAA being badly affected.

We are on the cusp of a new digital era and we are strategically placed from a geographic, infrastructural and knowledge perspective to herald the dawn of the next phase of Ireland's economic growth. If we do not take urgent action, such as the appointment of a Minister for rural affairs, a two-tier nation is developing in Ireland where young vibrant cities sit uneasily beside ageing rural communities increasingly reliant on State supports to survive. We need to confront very realistically the factors influencing rural decline today. We know about the high number of suicides in rural areas which are caused by rural isolation. All those issues and many more need to be addressed by the Government. I hope that when the Taoiseach is reshuffling his Cabinet he will see fit to appoint-----

See this speech in context