Rural regeneration programme entirely hinges on broadband

World of Politics with Harry McGee

For some years now, when you mention ‘broadband hub’ to a western politician, you can be as sure as night follows day that they will reply with just three words.

The Porter Shed.

Galway’s fantastic hub has shown the way of what can be done in terms of reimagining what can be done outside the Pale, in terms of bottom-up rather than top-down development.

As always, the policy and politicians have been lagging behind and are only coming around to following its lead now.

On Monday, four senior Government figures launched ‘Our Rural Future’, the latest five-year development policy for rural Ireland.

It is an impressive tome of 120 pages with 150 different actions to revive rural Ireland and arrest generations of depopulation and decline in the Irish countryside.

This is one of the areas that Covid-19 has made a little easier.

Now it’s a five-year plan or strategy which means there is a lot of very lofty rhetoric but not a huge amount of details, especially when it comes to splashing the cash.

Like a lot of these plans, it is mainly an amalgam of existing policies and Programme for Government commitments with some new promises and aspirations.

So the plan is to have 400 hubs around the country where people can work remotely with super-fast broadband. Without the pandemic, that shift to remote working would have taken many years.

It would have met some of the same resistance as Charlie McCreevy’s ill-fated decentralisation plan back in 2003. But the pandemic made it a reality now.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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