Two new reports from the National Economic and Social Council set out to provide some pathways towards ‘making rural Ireland resilient’, with one exploring the very meaning of the word ‘rural’ and the other suggesting how to use procurement and job creation to create wealth locally.

Challenges and Opportunities for Rural Ireland and the Agricultural Sector, identifies seven types of ‘rural’ — from very strong traditional rural to peri-urban rural areas adjacent to large towns and cities. This highlights common challenges such as declining numbers of young adults but also differences in changes in population density and consequent demand for services.

It is authored by three UCD academics who, apart from listing the challenges, have created a list of 106 opportunities, spanning social, environmental and economic activity, to work with communities and farmers to ‘co-create’ solutions and local value. These include developing new products, remote working, and solutions, all focused on climate action.

Economic Resilience in Sustainable Communities: Innovative Approaches in Public Spending to Maximise Local Benefits, examines how community wealth was increased in Preston, England, using a coordinated approach from local government to use procurement and job creation to create wealth locally.

Author Sean McCabe of TASC, a Green Party election candidate,  argues that this same approach has relevance for rural Ireland, for example, by using climate action resources, such as retrofit or renewable energy supports, as a catalyst for rural communities. Like the UCD research, the paper also focuses on co-creating these opportunities with local communities.

In Association with

NESC director Dr Larry O’Connell said: “The papers have already helped start a dialogue with NESC members and wider stakeholders about the future of rural areas, opportunities, and co-creation of solutions. The papers will also help NESC to continue to examine just transition and regional development in the future.”

The ‘Challenges’ paper points out that rural areas are not homogenous spaces, and come up with six varieties of rural area and stress strongly that each needs to be considered separately, given the  “statistically significant differences across the rural areas in demographics and vitality indicators”. 

Some of their the preliminary recommendations include: 

• Rural typologies need to be revisited and a reclassification of these typologies may be necessary with the next census. This should also include additional data such as the deprivation index, commuter data, national expenditure, the development of a diversity index etc, to facilitate more informed approaches reflecting a changing Ireland.
• Trends across typologies needs to be considered, beyond a binary urban and rural classification.
• Identify needs of communities in terms of change in demand for services, to ensure a vibrant rural community is sustained in rural areas.
• Policies should be considered to attract talent into the country and integration policies to retain and support working families.
• A co-design policy approach is necessary if recommendations are to be made for future rural communities.

Preston Model

McCabe’s paper examines more closely the concept of Community Wealth Building, particularly the so-called ‘Preston model’ which sets out to to increase flows of investment within local economies by harnessing the wealth that exists locally, as opposed to attracting national or international capital. 

The idea is that CWB would provide resilience where there is risk and local economic security where there is precariousness,  and McCabe mentions the example of local authority pension funds redirecting investment from global markets to local schemes.

In Preston, after considerable work to identify how money was leaving Lancashire, or being utilised in socially unproductive ways, opportunities were identified to capture and retain this spend for the benefit of local workers, employees and businesses. The result was that between 2012 and 2017 an additional £74m was retained in Preston and a further £200m additional funding was retained in the wider Lancashire area. 

The figures showed that over the five years locally retained spend increased within Preston from 5% to 18% and within Lancashire from 39% to 79%. Jobless rates fell from 6.5% in 2014 to 3.1% in 2017; 10% more 16-24-year-olds in Preston received a National Vocational Qualification of Level 3 or higher; and Preston moved out of the top 20% of most deprived local authority areas in Britain.

While recognising that such an approach is easier with more urbanised areas, McCabe believes that the approach can be adapted to rural needs and cites the success of the Leader programme up to the stage when it was suffused with political influence by the inclusion of local elected representatives and fell into decline.

McCabe’s paper is available here, while the UCD paper can be downloaded here.