The Kettle's Boyled: I blame that crowd up in Dublin

I wouldn’t go as far as Leo Varadkar in his recent contribution to the rural-urban divide, but rural Ireland does tend towards a kind of anger that sees urban dwellers as living like lords while the rest of us survive on crumbs from the national table. ‘That crowd up in Dublin’ are not only doing way better out of everything but they are also the cause of all our problems here in the provinces. ‘That crowd up in Dublin’ is a kind of blanket term to describe urban and suburban dwellers everywhere, and it all came to a head on our streets recently when a loose collection of farmers and contractors decided to stick it to ‘that crowd,’ all for some vague purpose that included cheaper diesel.

But do ‘that crowd’ get away with everything while ‘poor me’ labours around the clock, earning a bit less than nothing on a good day? Is there a fairness of reward for effort, or do the people who do all the work get nothing while ‘that crowd’ sit in offices and do nothing?

In truth, that perception might be wrong; if anything, ‘that crowd’ are paying a lot of our bills. In fact, we might be a lot smarter if we kept our heads down and just gathered in the money they throw at us.

It’s worth looking at the figures, they give a clearer picture, showing that Dublin people generate average taxes of around €30,000 per capita each year. In Roscommon we contribute almost €4,000 per head, the second lowest in Ireland, just ahead of Longford. So we have to get money from somewhere, and the obvious place is from ‘that crowd.’ Farming is a minority sport nowadays with farmers now comprising only four percent of the workforce even when you include farm workers, but farmers and rural dwellers do disproportionately well from the public purse.

The counties with higher property values pay higher property taxes, and 20% of this is distributed to the counties with the lowest tax take. So the double-mortgage family in Dublin with a balcony for an outside space is subsidising a mansion on an acre of lawns in Roscommon.

If you start to look at it like that, you realise the recent protest has done us no favours at all. It has deepened the division between urban and rural Ireland, and if the sleeping giant that is ‘that crowd’ wakes up, the only outcome for us will be pressure to pay our share and stop waving the begging bowl. Electoral support for the CAP, for instance, might dissipate.

If the aim of the people behind the protests was to create division and unrest, they have succeeded. If ‘that crowd’ start to ask hard questions, we may be the ultimate losers.