For years, Fiona Boyle (nee Barrett) and her four siblings tried to convince their father to sell his farmland in Ray, County Donegal. He had never had much luck with it, she said, and he still had to work full time and rent out the land to support the family. In the late 1980s, as the Irish economy struggled and the siblings grew older, they did what so many members of their generation did — they began to move away from rural Ireland to enhance their professional prospects (Boyle moved to England in order to start her nursing career). With his children gone, selling seemed like the only logical option for the elder Barrett. But he was determined to have his children return to their hometown.
In the end, a combination of Ireland’s economic revival in the 1990s — commonly referred to as the Celtic Tiger — and the desire to be around family convinced the Barrett siblings to return. Their father sold each of them a tract of land and one by one, they built homes on the homestead (one brother lives full time in Dublin, but returns often).
Now, while driving through Ray’s winding roads, one can see the family’s houses perched atop their respective hills, all within view of each other. “It wasn’t strangers moving in,” Boyle said, “which still would’ve been okay, as well. But it’s just different. I’m glad now we’re able to bring up our children in a place like this.” Boyle said that as a child she had always wanted to leave Ray because of its distance from Ireland’s larger cities, but now she can’t imagine her and her husband, Brendan, raising their three young children anywhere else.
Ray is a townland, an even smaller sub-division of land than a town. It shows up on Google Maps, but only if you zoom in closely enough, and is about equidistant from four slightly larger Donegal towns — Ramelton, Kerrykeel, Milford and Rathmullan. Despite its diminutive size and the real economic hardships its residents face, Ray has a chance to flourish. Fiona Boyle, the treasurer and former chair of Ray Community Group, said new businesses are popping up every so often in the surrounding area and young couples and families are moving back to where they grew up. And they’re not alone. “In the last five or six years, as well as locals who have a history here,” she said, “there’s an awful lot of people who have absolutely no connection with the Ray who’ve decided to come here.”
But Ray’s resurgence is anomalous to what is happening in much of the rest of rural Ireland. The country is urbanizing swiftly— 60 percent of the nation’s population lives in cities and the number is rising. Some prognosticators, reflecting global trends, predict that number will hit 75 percent by 2050. The number of people living rural areas has fallen precipitously in the last five decades, dropping from 66 percent in 1960 to 45 percent today, which, in turn has led to overcrowding in cities.
The United Nations has placed a significant emphasis on sustainability. This includes a list of 17 “sustainable development goals” which promote the eradication of hunger and poverty and the advancement of gender equality and clean energy, among several other sweeping objectives, all in the name of “achieving a better and more sustainable future for all” —rural and urban populations alike.
The current state of rural Ireland does not serve as the focal point for the UN’s approach toward sustainability, but on a national level, the issue is heavily discussed. Ray’s promise notwithstanding, rural towns and villages in Ireland are suffering. Post offices, pubs, and schools have closed in some places and the exodus to cities like Dublin and Cork, especially among young people, continues. To an outsider wandering through these areas, the idyllic green of the countryside often masks this decline. But the struggles are real.
Recently, the Irish government has attempted measures to counter the nation’s issues through means closely aligned with the UN’s sustainable development goals. Rural development has factored in significantly on many of the government’s proposed plans of action. Project Ireland 2040 is a recently launched attempt to spur progress by more evenly disperse social, economic and cultural resources, regardless of geographic location. In 2014, the government designated 1 billion Euros for a six-year-long Rural Regeneration and Development Fund called “Realising our Rural Potential, with the goal of increasing jobs and tourism in rural areas. It has invested more than 50 million euros in sports and cultural facilities. The plan also includes 250 million euros from LEADER, the European Union’s rural development initiative, which helped get Ray’s crown jewel — its community center — off the ground in 2010.
Ireland’s Department of Rural and Community Development has singled out the Ray project as an exemplary one for future development projects. The community center has been nominated for two Pride of Place awards — a contest that honors communities doing exceptional work throughout Ireland. In August, 200 people came out for a celebration barbecue the day that the Pride of Place judges came to visit Ray.
The center itself does not directly drive population or economic growth, but it has become a real draw for families looking to raise children outside of urban centers, Boyle said. It is an important cog in the long process of building a sustainable rural community, and, she said, a welcome replacement for the local men-centric pub as Ray’s social center. Sports and other kinds of events have replaced alcohol as the townland’s driving impetus for community gatherings. It also attracts people from the four surrounding towns.
For example, one of the programs put on by the Ray Community Group, Men on the Move, provides time and space for adult men to keep active and socialize with each other and to feel less isolated, a recognized trigger in rural Ireland for depression and suicide. Liam McFadden, a Rathmullen resident and member of the Ray Community Group, said that Men on the Move has connected many of the area’s farmers.
Ray’s residents have also embraced their heritage. Patrick Loughrey, born and raised in Ray, splits his time between Ray and London, where he was a producer for the BBC for 25 years. As Ray’s designated local historian, he has helped restore and preserve the townland’s mass rock an historic site where Catholics would attend clandestine masses during the Penal Times when the British outlawed Catholicism — as well as the raith (an Irish word from which Ray derives its name), an ancient circular enclosure in a field behind Loughrey’s home that was long ago the local burial ground for infants barred from a church burial because they died before their baptisms. Ray residents and a plough horse cleared the brush to put up a memorial for the children, previously lost to time and memory. A proactive citizenry helped save these parts of local history from fading away.
“That’s what Ray’s all about,” Boyle said.
Boyle and her fellow Ray residents raise their own money, securing small grants and hosting fundraising activities. The bottom-up approach is the ideal situation for rural development projects, said Kristiina Tammets, LEADER’s Vice President, who is based in Estonia, but has worked on projects throughout the continent. “It helps to involve all local stakeholders, communities to take responsibility, to decide and develop their own living and working environment,” she said. “This is a really essentially thing in LEADER. It gives people the tools to manage to their own territories. It’s empowerment of people.”
In Ireland, there is skepticism about plans like Project 2040 and “Realising our Rural Potential,” and there is a sense that trying to force more balanced rural and urban development could backfire. And places like Ray are not on the cusp of turning into booming metropolises — success is always tenuous. But the townland has, for the moment, established itself as a sustainable community, thanks in large part to its own citizens and Boyle is cautiously optimistic about her home’s future. “I think there’s great feel-good about Ray itself,” she said. “That’s great to hear. We know we do great work. Economy-wise it’s hard to know what’s going to happen.”
PHOTO: Ray in the summer of 2018. By Tim O’Donnell.
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