It is strange to observe how, after decades of pretending there was no problem, the powers-that-be are now performing acrobatics in their attempts to display interest in the fate of the west. Such was the vehemence of the longtime official campaign to "prove" the region was no more disadvantaged than anywhere else that some of us wondered if the experience of our own lives was deceiving us. Then, all of a sudden, our impressions were transformed into conventional wisdom.
The Cabinet's trip to Ballaghaderreen was, of course, first and foremost a PR exercise, but it was still an important symbolic statement. It was important for the west, for the "BMW region" and for the health of Irish democracy.
The choice of Ballaghaderreen as the locus of this symbol, whether by calculation or happenstance, was also apt. And despite all the complacency generated by the artificial life-support system of multinational industry underwritten by low taxes, the image of picketing farmers in the square in Ballaghaderreen carries enough truth to remind us that certain fundamentals have not changed at all.
For all the tedious guff about the "urbanisation" of Ireland, in truth, this society remains a rural landscape studded with small towns. Even what we call cities are no more than a coalition of villages, "a multiplicity of Charlestowns", in one of John Healy's resonant phrases. Perhaps, in last week's contrived symbol, given life just a few miles from where Healy grew up, there is some hope that we can return to a more truthful self-image after decades of Stickie nonsense.
With all the current talk about urban-this and rural-that, it is rarely acknowledged that these categories sidestep the experience of the half of Ireland's population born in what are condescendingly known as "small towns". Perhaps it's because so few of those with such origins are willing to proffer this experience other than as nostalgia or prejudice.
Certainly, the small town has had a bad press, the term itself being capable of unadapted use as a cypher for introversion, inertia and small-mindedness. And yet, those of us who grew up in small towns in the second half of this century probably had a much richer experience than those who, on account of their alleged urbanity, regard us as products of some underdeveloped valley of twitching, squinting windows.
To walk the length of a street in a west of Ireland town in my lifetime was to walk through at least three centuries in a few minutes. You could stop at the fair green to talk to a mountainy man about the price of cattle or the Civil War, and then move to the cafe to discuss the music and musings of Brian Eno.
Moreover, both encounters would be subject to a mutual respect and a sense of the everyday far ahead of the cultural commentaries which would later tell us how culturally deprived we had been.
The negative images attaching to small towns, of course, have less to do with their reality than with contorted notions of home carried around in the heads of their erstwhile denizens. It is always slightly amazing to Irish people to hear outsiders praise the place of their origins, and this is especially true of the small town, which has neither the elemental beauty of the countryside nor the aesthetic virtue of the city streetscape. Our invariable expectation is that the opener "I was down your part of the country the other day," will be followed by a terse litany of satire or complaint.
This sense of inferiority is just the flipside of the equally exaggerated defensive chauvinism which attaches to one's relationship with a home town while one is living in it. For those who emanated from the locus of that much-maligned entity "Middle Ireland", objectivity is impossible.
The propaganda of the outside world meeting the inferiority of the indigenous mindset results in the disintegration of the relationship between person and place. Negativity rises to the top, and the positive qualities of living in a small town are reduced to a sediment of nostalgia, to be invoked only in drink or in dotage.
It is, of course, precisely a problem with being in the middle. In a certain paradoxical sense, rural and urban are intensely similar, in that both evoke emotions of either love or hate in the hearts of those they have nurtured and released.
But the relationship with a small town is unlike either, being characterised by deeply ambiguous feelings, in many cases amounting to a mild neurosis. The town is both metaphor for, and repository of, the entire universe, and yet is saturated by a profound familiarity which can be deeply repugnant to the soul of a young man or woman.
In many ways, it is more like the relationship between parent and child than between place and inhabitant. At a certain point, the young adult has not merely to get away, but must actively reject the town as part of the process of growing up.
Although I grew up in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, I believe that my relationship with the slightly smaller town of Ballaghaderreen, 12 miles away, enabled me to see these things a little more clearly.
It was necessary for me to "travel", even a little distance away, to experience the otherness of another town. In "Ballagh" I could experience "home" in a manner uncomplicated by the prejudice, claustrophobia and inhibition that of necessity infects the relationship with one's home town.
All of the important landmarks in a young life - first drink, first slow dance, first date, even my first car crash - I experienced in or near "Ballagh", where it was possible to undergo these without the patina of inhibition which would have attached to them at home.
Ballaghaderreen therefore became a kind of surrogate town, which allowed me to project on to it mainly positive notions, while reserving all feelings of contempt for what was more familiar. In the end, it allowed me to see the extent to which my bad feelings about home were in my head rather than reality.
Perhaps collectively, too, we all need a place on to which we can project the sense of pride and affection which only comes when you have transcended other people's notions of what you are supposed to be. Whether we like it or not, we are a small-town society. This, perhaps, is what the Government's subconscious was thinking of.