Kettle's Boyled: Room to improve on the revival of rural towns

I’m not a big fan of RTÉ, mostly because I believe they provide poor value for money. Many of their top presenters are overpaid for what they do, and their talents often compare unfavourably for instance with presenters on our local radio stations. RTÉ also tends to be Dublin-centred in its programming, with small token nods towards the rest of Ireland with magazine programmes like ‘Countrywide.’ Their flagship weekly programme, the Late Late Show, should be brought on tour to a different venue several times each season, but that never happens. For RTÉ, the world begins and ends in Donnybrook.

Those are generalisations of course, and there are exceptions to all that. Some programmes get out and about in all corners of Ireland, and can even provide us with useful information on top of the entertainment value. One such is the property renovation show ‘Room to Improve.’ This season, the show kicked off in Charlestown, where a woman from the town renovated her former childhood home and shop to provide a fine three-bedroom dwelling. There’s a lot to be said for living in a town, you are close to shops and services, and concerns about rural isolation are resolved. In many countries, rural dwellers tend to retire from farms and move to towns, allowing their successors to live on the farm. That tends not to happen here, and most rural towns have too many empty shops and houses, defying all attempts by government to reverse that trend. From a societal standpoint there is good reason to encourage older people to live close to services, but it doesn’t happen. Reading between the lines of that particular programme in Charlestown, it is easy to see why that is the case. It just costs too much.

The renovation of the house in question cost €345,000. That was reduced somewhat by various grants, but it’s still a lot of money. If somebody had to buy a house needing repair in a rural town, spending a conservative €100,000, it would be easy to end up spending well over €400,000 to acquire a modest home in a town centre. For €100,000 less, you could own a fine home just out the road. It’s no wonder there isn’t a rush to repopulate our town centres in rural Ireland.

If governments are serious about housing policy and revitalising rural towns, they are going to have to come up with more money, the present funding levels aren’t attractive enough. Small towns could have a vibrant mix of older people and younger remote workers utilising the National Broadband network, but unless there is a serious attempt to address this cost imbalance, it won’t happen. RTÉ may be a lame duck, but sometimes they do the State some service, and highlighting this cost issue may well be one such time. Assuming anybody in our new government is paying attention.