Listeners to my weekly podcast with Sarah Ryan last week may have heard me make a point of recommending that people should always seek out and read the views of people with whom they fundamentally disagree. In the context of that conversation, I mentioned that I make a point of never missing a column by the Irish Times’ most well-known columnist, Fintan O’Toole, on the grounds that while I might usually disagree with him, the arguments he makes are almost always solid and thought-provoking. It is not surprising then that yesterday, he published a piece that makes about the strongest possible argument for a position that I, and I’m sure many readers, find to be ridiculous: Towns like Roscrea, he said, are not “full”. They are, he writes, empty:
The population of Roscrea in 1841 was 9,000. Today it is 5,542. If it’s full today, what was it before the Famine? Was it good to get rid of those “excess” people?
Vacancy is, I believe, the precise opposite of fullness. There is in fact plenty of empty space within the town: the 5.3 hectare site of the former Antigen factory on Lourdes Road has been unoccupied for years. So have Grant’s Hotel, which has been disused since 2013, and the old Sacred Heart Convent.
The vacancy rate for properties within the town is indeed much higher than the average in the county and in Ireland as a whole. At the last count, in March 2023, 51 of the 315 commercial premises in Roscrea were empty and a further eight were characterised as derelict. There are boarded-up shop fronts on the lovely old streets. Much of the historic centre of the town, Main Street and Castle Street, is blighted by abandoned buildings.
The most recent count of vacant houses I can find goes back to the 2016 census, but at that time 14 per cent of residential units in Roscrea were unoccupied.
Historically, Roscrea’s big problem is not overpopulation. It’s depopulation.
As a strict matter of fact, Fintan is of course entirely correct: Roscrea is not full in the sense that if one wished to fit more people into Roscrea, one could do that with relative ease. Nor is Ireland full, in the sense that if one were to assign a square meter of ground or so to every person who wished to live here and pitch a tent, we could probably accommodate several hundred million people. If “fullness” were measured simply in terms of available space, then we would not be full until such time as the country could not physically accommodate more people without some people falling off the edges of the Cliffs of Moher and drowning. If “fullness” were measured simply in terms of the availability of existing buildings, then we would not be full until the last disused factory in Roscommon was converted into a reception centre.
This is, though literally correct, a self-serving and rather smug definition of “full”. It is also one that is broadly out of step with Fintan’s own view of the necessity and value of Government.
That the population of Roscrea is today 5,542 people is something that we know only because it is the figure returned by the most recent census. The purpose of that census was not simply to count heads, but to allocate resources. Roscrea may have literal room in abandoned factories and derelict houses for the 9,000 people that Fintan mentions, but the Government has not provided – or envisioned providing – healthcare, education, or a raft of other services for a population of 9,000 people.
If “full” is more reasonably defined as “the number of people the infrastructure of an area can reasonably be expected to support without coming under enormous pressure” then Fintan’s argument about fullness becomes a whole lot more tenuous, as is evidenced by the fact that in this case the sudden growth of the population is to be accompanied by the removal of the last hotel remaining in the town.
Nor has any protestor or local in Roscrea suggested that the town lacks literal space for more people. If we actually listen to what the locals say, then we hear worries about a lack of GPs and doctors, an insufficient number of Gardai, and so on. Nobody has claimed that the town lacks literal space.
But there’s another issue: Fintan’s argument has, implicit within it, the notion that if space is available, it should automatically be filled, and offered in effect to whomsoever wants to claim it. Also implicit in the argument about dereliction and the lack of jobs is that the people of Roscrea should see the arrival of newcomers as a form of investment by the Government – why, one might almost think that Government was doing the town a favour by imposing newcomers upon it.
This, I fear, is to fundamentally misunderstand the different kinds of ways in which a town can grow and develop. Roscrea would grow naturally, after all, were it to become a location for enterprise and business, or receive a new factory with 300 jobs which would attract 300 new employees to the town who would spend their money in local businesses and grow the place. This is very different from inviting 300 people who will be on very low incomes and will – by virtue of economic reality – contribute very little to the growth of the town. The old phrase is, after all, “build it and they will come”, not “send them and we’ll build it”.
One might see how the people of Roscrea and other such towns might just find Fintan’s argument a little insulting. After all, they’ve been crying out for investment for decades and now they are effectively being told that the migrants who will call their old hotel home are that investment, and that they’re borderline ungrateful for objecting.
This is an argument that might wash in the opinion pages of the Irish Times. I am unconvinced that it will persuade many of the locals in Roscrea, or elsewhere.