While Irish farmers are among the best educated in the EU, a conference on rural development heard that a darker picture was painted by a separate study on child well-being which put Ireland 18th among the nations of the enlarged European Union.
Prof Chris Curtin, of the NUI Galway, told the Irish Leader support unit annual conference, in Croke Park, that the latest EU study on child well-being had used 80 points of reference to make comparisons.
In his paper, Partnership, Social Capital and Rural Development, he said that in the area of social capital, Ireland, which some say is the richest country in Europe, ranked 18 out of 25.
"That raises the question of the relationship of rural develop-ment to social as well as economic questions," he said.
There were 80 indicators used in the study, including matters like health and eduction, he said. Malta came out on top and then one of Europe's poorest countries, Greece. "Ireland and the UK come out very poorly but as might be expected, the Scandinavian countries were high on the list," Prof Curtin said.
Details of the EU study on the level of education in the farming sector, found that 45 per cent of Irish farmers were deemed to have "a full and basic education".
Eamon O'Hara, of the Irish regions office of the EU Com- mission in Brussels, said Ireland ranked alongside Germany, Holland, Denmark and Finland in having the best-educated farmers. He said UK and Danish farmers were in the third division while Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece were found to have the lowest education levels with less than 15 per cent of farmers having a full and basic education.
The conference, which is being attended by nearly 300 delegates involved in rural development and other development partner-ships, heard there was a danger of Dublin's infrastructure "capsizing" the rest of the country.
Dr Patricia O'Hara, policy manager at the Western Development Commission, said the burden of growth on Dublin will become unsustainable and will drain the lifeblood out of the regions unless there was an acceleration of development outside the capital. "It is time that we recognise that investment in the regions is actually good for Dublin and essential for Ireland.
"Indeed, I sometimes wonder why opinion-makers in the Greater Dublin Area are not the most vocal proponents of the development of the regions, as this would be of major direct benefit to them," she said.
"Despite Dublin's relative prosperity it is, without a doubt, the most pressurised, expensive and congested part of Ireland and massive public investment has, quite rightly, been earmarked to tackle these pressures."
She said we were in danger of tilting the country's infrastructure so much towards Dublin that the rest of the country "will fall into the capital".
Liam Scollan, managing director of Ireland West Airport in Knock, Co Mayo, called for a completely new vision of enterprise in rural Ireland as a matter of urgency. He said recent policies aimed at balanced regional development represented urban answers to urban problems and did not go far enough to respond sufficiently to rural opportunities.
"We use just a tiny fraction of our fisheries and sea resources. We have failed to exploit tourism to the extent that we now spend more on foreign holidays than we get from tourists coming in, and farming, if not dead, is on its last legs," said Mr Scollan who called for more co-ordinated thinking in policy-making areas.