A spate of tragedies in Donegal begs the question: What is the Irish government doing for this forgotten county?
Dear Minister,
How’s it going, Eoghan? My emails are getting to be like the 49 bus: you wait ages for one to come, and then two arrive at once. Not that it was much of a bother to you, I’m sure: at this stage, I doubt doubt my missives get even to the Spam folder. I was talking about this correspondence there at the weekend and people asked me if you had ever replied. “Not so much as a thank you please f**k off,” I reply. It seems rejected job candidates and failed actors rank higher on the list of those deserving social etiquette than I do.
Not that I’m bitter.
In any case, I couldn’t write for a vast tranche of the past . Having binge-watched The Ted Bundy Tapes and mixed some pills I definitely shouldn’t have mixed, I ended up writhing and jabbering in a basement somewhere off Gardner Street. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I do remember random conversations with the residents – stringy, dead-eyed types – about the immutable nature of existence, the arbitrary edge of society and so on and so forth. Riveting stuff for me, but I don’t think they were too interested…
When I emerged back into the January daylight, the first thing I did was to grab the Irish Times from a newsagent on Dorset Street and see what I’d missed. I was clearly still a bit addled, because I couldn’t really get a handle on any story until I’d reached the Property section, which contained a bizarre story about houses in Sicily going for €1 each. This, of course, is the same publisher that earlier this month described a million-euro pricetag for a Dublin home as “modest”, so there was bound to be a catch. And indeed there was: each home in the Sicilian town of Sambuca would need a massive overhaul. So you’d probably end up paying hundreds of thousands to live in a town named after a drink which you would only consume under duress, or it was 4.30am and you’d drunk everything else in the cabinet. Well, it beats living in Donegal, I suppose…
And that’s the other thing I’ve noticed since my “lost weekend”: Donegal has been in the news a lot this month. Aside from a bunch of local racists trying to burn down a hotel earmarked for asylum seekers (more of which later), the stories seem to be about road accidents.
Worse still, the victims seem to be completely undeserving of their fate. First there was that young teacher who jumped in front of a 4×4 on a downhill roll to save the life of a child. Then, only last weekend, a car crash killed four young lads (“lovely lads”, as they’ve been described, “gentlemen”).
The overwhelming tragedy of these events is vastly exacerbated by the two kinds of people they killed: the generous and the young. Few of us can claim to be either. Most of us, upon our deaths, are destined for purgatory, if it exists – and which, if it does, I’d say consists of endless repetition – whatever was happening, say, at the moment of death. This in itself doesn’t sound terrible until you realise that anything becomes hellish on constant repeat. After a while, your mind disconnects from the sensory input and starts to try to figure out what’s going on and how the hell do I get out of here?
If you’ve ever travelled on a Donegal road, you might have a notion of how sadly inevitable these kinds of accidents are. And you should know, minister, because you were there yourself only a couple of weeks ago, doing another interminable grip-and-grin with local politicians at another interminable housing development.
Great to be in Donegal with @McHughJoeTD this morning.
Visiting new homes & sites today that together will house more than 300 people thanks to almost €23m from taxpayer. A small but important part of housing activity underway by @donegalcouncil pic.twitter.com/KaVTfImIHm
— Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) January 11, 2019
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You’ve got to work on your PR, minister. Speaking as an avid follower, I’m getting a bit tired of all the photo ops at turf-turnings around the country. As I’ve said before, the micro events mean next to nothing to the hordes of people trying to get by. Much less to a county – Donegal – whose constituents have been consistently neglected by the national government.
Because if there’s one thing that Donegal and Sicily both have in common, it’s that civic abandonment. “bandit country” perception. This is partly the fault of geography. They’re both sticking out of their countries like an abscess, and as a result their often last on the government’s list of priorities. To make things worse, Donegal’s elected representatives demonstrate an absolute lack of leadership and political nous (just like my other antagonist of the week, Councillor Brian Lawlor). Local TD Charlie McConalogue opposed a disused hotel in Moville being used to house asylum seekers with the same “concerns” about property planning and zoning laws – just a couple of days before a couple of local thugs, in much the same mindset, attempted to burn the hotel to the ground.
Take a step back and you see how far Donegal is from the national view. Its income is the lowest in Ireland; its population has grown at a much slower rate than the rest of the country over the past 30 years or so; and although it is set to be more affected by Brexit than any other county, its name hardly passes the lips of any politician involved in the farrago.
It’s no wonder the roads are in such a state. I was once forced to walk the winding road between Muff and Moville at night – where there were no streetlights and yet locals drove like lunatics – and it near killed me. If a national politician ever drove on a road like this in, say, Offaly, en route to some event on the west coast, he or she might make note of it and try to fix the problem. But what politician ever travels as far as Donegal?
So the next time you tweet about Donegal, Minister, your message had better amount to more than just a photo op and a handshake. At the very most, you might actually be able to straighten out a road, or house a family, and thus save a life or two. That’s enough to take you to heaven.
All the best,
Simon
Missives to the Minister 