Fintan O'Toole: Irish villages are dead unless we come up with plan fast

Village life in Ireland used to be characterised by the title of Brinsley McNamara's Valley of the Squinting Windows, published a hundred years ago.

But perhaps it should now be the Valley of the Curtained Windows. McNamara, in his thinly disguised portrait of Delvin, County Meath, brought to life a claustrophobic world in which everyone knew everyone else’s business.

The closure of 159 village post offices is a symptom of the gradual creation of an equal and opposite condition: one in which nobody will know anybody. The windows that squinted with rapacious curiosity have their curtains drawn to hide the lonely lives behind them. Everyone looking at you is being replaced by no one is looking out for you.

I’m old enough to remember when, if you wanted to phone someone in rural Ireland, you asked the operator for something like Falcarragh 12. And when that operator passed you on to the local operator she would say something like “Ah no, they’re not there. I saw the car passing this morning and they’re on the way to Bundoran to visit their auntie who’s just out of hospital with an abscess on her breast. Shockin’ pain she was in the poor woman. You might try them about 6 o’clock.” It was both charming and rather scary – who needed the secret police?

Diarmaid Ferriter: What ever happened to free education in Ireland?

---

Government will pay price for neglect of rural Ireland

---

Newton Emerson: Unionists don't understand the resentment over Border checkpoints

---

The Irish Times view on Myanmar: the world must act

---

But there was also a side to this intense intimacy that was kind and gentle. I remember being in a shop in Gort in County Galway when the State had just given pensioners free phones.

Keeping an eye out

An elderly man came in and told the shopkeeper excitedly that his phone had been installed. The shopkeeper said “Sure give us your number there and I’ll give you ring later to make sure it’s working.” He wrote it down on a list with all the other numbers of all the other pensioners. And you knew that he’d call those numbers when they didn’t turn up according to their usual habits – just keeping an eye out for them.

So the closure of the post office isn't the fundamental problem. It just dramatises a much larger sense of decline and abandonment.

I was recently in one of the places that’s now about to lose its post office, the north Kerry village of Moyvane, with my friend, the great bard of Irish village life Gabriel Fitzmaurice.

I’d been there a few times over the years and if there was a place in Ireland that seemed to have a sense of its own identity, it was here. Moyvane was so self-confident that its dairy co-op was one of the few that voted to remain independent and not sell out to a big conglomerate.

But if you go there now, there is a palpable and visible sense of a collective life draining away. Shops and pubs – including the well-known Brosnan’s bar – are shuttered. The main street is eerily quiet.

So the closure of the post office isn't the fundamental problem. It just dramatises a much larger sense of decline and abandonment. John K Rogers, in a letter to The Irish Times last week, wrote of his own place, Rathowen in Westmeath: "Our village once had three pubs, two groceries, a butcher, a Garda station and a post office, and all this before a huge speculative building spree of new houses and an increase in population. We now are down to one pub and a hotel catering for passing traffic." The sorry tale is similar everywhere.

Local people

Maybe, for all the sentimental rhetoric, we just don’t care for our villages. It is local people, after all, who chose to build one-off houses in the countryside rather than live in one.

It was very telling that Bertie Ahern in his pomp in 2005 discovered the concept of 'social capital'

It is local people who drive 30 miles to Lidl or Aldi rather than keep the village butcher going. Maybe all that squinting windows stuff, the nosiness and the forced intimacy and the sense of living one’s life in public, has created a secret dislike of the small community. But what’s the alternative?

An island Motopia where we have half a dozen cities and everywhere else is commuter country?

It was very telling that Bertie Ahern in his pomp in 2005 discovered the concept of “social capital” and invited its author Robert Puttnam to address the Fianna Fáil think-in.

Puttnam is an important thinker but was it not remarkable that a party that regards itself as deeply embedded in rural life had to import an American academic to tell it about this apparently new idea?

Yet even the “capital” part of “social capital” is real. How much money in hospital and nursing home charges do the health benefits for an elderly person of a weekly visit to the post office save?

Conversely, how much is the extra traffic involved in 30km round trips to the post office going to cost us in fines for failing to meet our emission reduction targets?

If we want to let village life die and let rural people die in isolation, let’s be honest and say so.

If not, we need a joined-up national plan for vibrant villages with broadband, housing, medical and transport services, small businesses and, yes, post offices. Saving those 159 post offices won’t save village life from a slow demise. But it might at least put a small stamp on the pious promissory notes that have been returned to sender.