'Church will remain closed for summer months,' concerns over 'decay' in rural Tipperary
Lattin/Cullen Notes - Deserted Village article
Back in 1968, at a time of harsh economic depression, John Healy wrote about his native Charlestown in Death of an Irish Town.
Almost sixty years later in a country "awash with money", the decline in rural areas continues unabated.
All over Ireland, small towns and village are in decline, young people are emigrating, business are closing and even our schools and churches are in imminent danger of closing their doors.
But who is in charge and do they really care about rural communities?
And even if they did, could the legislators even find our small villages on a map?
I have previously written in these notes about the inadequacy of services within our own parish; the absence of even a shop, a housing development built over fifteen years ago in which the majority of the houses remain unoccupied, the regular interruptions to water and electricity supplies, and now a church that will remain closed for the summer months.
We constantly hear promises of better housing, health and bank services, but no one in their hearts and souls believes that anymore.
Two hundred years before John Healy wrote his seminal work, another great Irish writer, Oliver Goldsmith, bemoaned the decline of his own beloved Auburn in his poem The Deserted Village.
Ill fares the land to hast'ning ills a pray,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Since Goldsmith's time our country has been transformed by wars, famine, emigration and industrial revolution, but some things just never change.