An iconic North Mayo business closed its doors in the summer of 2024 - and there wasn’t even a whimper of protest.
As published in the Western People, 31 December 2024
Mitchell's Centra Supermarket, Moygownagh © Mike Kinsella (2017).jpg
While I was gathering oral history for my PhD, traveling the boreens and byways of North Mayo and West Sligo, I interviewed one old man who wanted me to come outside into his garden before I left his home, after we had enjoyed a lively chat about local characters and names of fields.
“Can you hear it?” he asked, looking at me with sudden saddened eyes.
I heard only a lone dog barking somewhere and a car revving in the distance.
“Hear what?” I replied.
He sighed, turning to look in the direction of the now-closed local national school.
‘‘The quiet… I could set me watch when the children would be out playing each day and now... nothing, just meself and the wind.”
He hurried me to my car, not wanting his glistening eyes to give away the ache of community loss. As I was closing the car door, he suddenly remembered something.
“You don’t have children yourself?”
“No,” I answered and he just nodded, saying: “Ah well.”
As I drove back to my parents’ home in the spitting rain, I fought with the realisation that without children, seemingly active communities would disappear. It happened sooner than I expected.
The end, when it came, was quick. For the rest of the world, June 24th, 2024, may not have stood out as especially noteworthy but when Mitchell’s shop, public house, post office, farm supplies and hardware store failed to open that morning, it signalled the end of a business which had been the beating heart of Moygownagh village since World War II. A simple note stuck on the darkened entrance doors told uninformed customers that ‘Mitchells’ was closed indefinitely. The previous evening, friends were invited by text to a final ‘last orders’ in the bar. No reason was given, nor needed.
The root cause of the closure of clubs, schools, pubs, shops, post offices, businesses and parochial houses throughout North Mayo is depopulation. Moygownagh alone has lost a staggering 90% of its people since 1841, with the tipping point of sustainability likely having passed a decade ago. Two of its three primary schools closed in my lifetime, with Glenmore National School shutting a year after a smiling Taoiseach Enda Kenny was photographed lavishing praise on both teachers and pupils.
Moygownagh GAA club, with its impressive football pitch, community centre and offices, was founded in 1979, but the parish boasts a long GAA history before that. On April 22, 1888, it fielded one of only 14 teams in the inaugural Mayo GAA championship. Yet, even as the photos of proud club inter-county heroes Anthony Finnerty and Pat Holmes adorn the entrance hall to the community centre, the club is now battling for survival, having already amalgamated its underage teams with those of neighbouring parishes facing the same depopulation pressures. The stark truth is that there are not enough local players to field a team in 15-a-side competitions.
North Mayo is being stripped of its native population at a slow, yet catastrophic rate. Moygownagh itself lies within a rural hinterland that has suffered continuous post-Independence decline and a dramatic 59% fall in population from 1911 to 1951, which was symptomatic of the greater malaise of the Irish state.
Shouting stop
John Healy’s book No One Shouted Stop ( The Death of an Irish Town), published in 1968, is a poignant chronicle of the economic and social decline of rural life in the west of Ireland, specifically focusing on his hometown of Charlestown. Healy captured a pivotal moment in Irish history, highlighting the challenges faced by rural communities during a time of significant social and economic change, contributing to rural decline while documenting the human cost of this transformation. His book was a cry for attention to the neglect of the West by decision-makers in Dublin, claiming that rural economic decay, mass emigration and the loss of traditional rural life with its impact on the cohesion of the local communities, was being ignored by official Ireland.
But despite his insight, Healy’s title was wrong. Everybody had been shouting stop for 100 years before he ever penned his book and in all the decades thereafter. Bishops, politicians, farmers’ groups and community advocates have long decried the continuing bleeding of our rural population. In my memory alone, we have had the lobby groups Council for the West, Communities Under Threat, Action ’98 and Independent Mayo, aside from vocal development and community groups such as IRD Kiltimagh. In their turn, local authorities and state agencies have destroyed small rainforests with their glossy publications on rural development, while local TDs have beaten their chests blue (and green) with their spiel of ‘Saving the West’.
Yet, beneath all the talk of community regeneration has been an unspoken understanding that rural regions are doomed to the vagaries of modern economics and the unseen hand of the markets, whether they be in northern Greece, central France or North Mayo. At geography class in Gortnor Abbey secondary school, Mr John Harkin strode up and down the classroom drumming into us how progressive EEC policies meant that Ireland’s ‘uneconomic’ family farms would be thankfully forced to amalgamate into larger productive holdings. I remember thinking that this loss of hundreds of thousands of small farmers could be a bit of a problem but was left reassured that the powers-that-be knew what they were doing. I couldn’t have known then that they simply didn’t care about places like North Mayo at best, or at worst, despised them. Clearly, the bureaucrats knew that dissolving a couple of hundred thousand small farms was going to denude the countryside of farming families, yet they did next to nothing about it.
But it was not always so. The Oweninny Works opened on November 7, 1951, in what was Bord na Móna’s then biggest undertaking, injecting much-needed economic life into a North Mayo long starved of development. The promise of regular wages drew a labour force to an area chronically lacking in employment opportunities. While many questioned Bord na Móna’s choice of Bellacorick, given the unpredictable Atlantic weather, it was encouraged by such visionary politicians as Sean Lemass and public servants as Todd Andrews, to provide local electricity, create jobs, and ultimately curb emigration from the region.
The 1960s and 1970s saw a boom time for North Mayo with the influence of Bord na Móna and the ESB positively shaping every aspect of community life.
Meanwhile, the Asahi chemicals plant in Killala generated hundreds of jobs, while Hollister was expanding its workforce in Ballina. Much of this employment paid well and, in particular, the seasonality and part-time nature of the Oweninny milled peat operations supplemented local family farm incomes, with the knock-on effect being the flourishing of local businesses such as Mitchell’s of Moygownagh.
However, by the dawn of the Irish Celtic Tiger, the appetite of the state for getting directly involved in social enterprises had shifted to a more laissez-faire capitalist bent and a colder view of demographic shifts. The closure of the Bellacorick Power Station was first mooted in 1997 and it eventually closed in 2005 with the loss of more than 500 jobs at its peak, even as workers argued the plant had several years left with a minimal upgrade. This occurred after 315 jobs went with the closure of the Asahi plant in 1997 and another 220 people had been made redundant with the 2001 closure of Henniges Elastomer Ireland in Ballina. Despite this crushing economic ‘perfect storm’ of unemployment, North Mayo was largely left to its fate by the powers-that-be.
Contrast the aftermath of the effective loss of 1,000 jobs in North Mayo with the loss of the same number in Galway. At its peak, the Digital Equipment Corporation employed over 1,200 people in the city. The Irish media ran front-page headlines in 1993 when news broke that Digital was to cease hardware manufacturing and over 700 people were to lose their jobs. The Government’s response was public and swift, with a commitment to supporting affected workers and communities while strategically positioning the region for future economic growth in the technology sector.
A task force was established to work in conjunction with the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). The primary goal of this task force was to attract new employment opportunities to the area in the wake of the factory’s closure. Efforts were made to identify and create new employment opportunities, leveraging the skills and experience of the former skilled workforce. The remaining software operation in Galway became a foundation for future growth with many former employees using their experience to launch successful careers and businesses in Galway and elsewhere. The event ultimately contributed to the development of a strong information technology (IT) and medical sector in the city.
Compared to the size of Galway City, the loss of around 300 jobs with the closure of the entire Oweninny works had a much greater pro-rata effect yet it evoked an inverse Government response. Hundreds of families in North Mayo lost their main employment and so began an acceleration of the existing decline of the area, as evidenced by the 3,000 applications for 150 jobs when the Coca-Cola plant opened in Ballina in 1999.
Yet, when the Bellacorick power station was shut down there was no ‘Digital-style’ task force. A few years earlier, at a pivotal meeting in Athlone, where the future of the three peat-powered ESB stations was being decided, senior Fianna Fáil politicians from the Midlands, with government officials, lobbied for the closure of Bellacorick Power station in lieu of the West Offaly and Lanesborough Power Stations along the Shannon. As the proceedings became heated, the workers’ representatives from Bellacorick were told in no uncertain terms that keeping their plant open was a waste of time and money as the Midlands had a growing population and vibrant community, while North Mayo was backward and demographically unsustainable. One official caustically observed that while the landscape in North Mayo was beautiful, it was a shame that people actually lived there to ruin it.
In a damning closing argument, future Taoiseach Brian Cowen TD insisted that the notable absence of any Mayo politician at the meeting proved there was no local need for keeping the plant open (all Mayo TDs had been invited but failed to attend). The outcome was the imminent Bellacorick plant closure, salved with a €3 million ‘Fiontar Chomhraic’ fund established by the ESB with a so-called primary purpose to support the development of businesses in areas impacted by the closure. In effect, the fund became administered by Mayo County Council, mostly for grants to community and training projects, with an ESB official privately admitting that he saw the education of young people to emigrate as the best solution for local unemployment. His opinion is not by any means unique.
Local fatalism
The perception by residents living in the shadows of the multiple wind farms built and being planned for the vast region west of Ballina is that Mayo County Council has written off the area as primarily an energy-generating wilderness. This attitude is not helped by planning officials telling a would-be returned emigrant who wanted to build her new home on family land in Lacken that she should live in Castlebar instead, where she was employed. It is also not assisted by a senior council official telling community advocates that their efforts to make Nephin mountain accessible to visitors is a pointless endeavour, as Croagh Patrick is the sole tourism mountain and would remain so.
Ballycastle has a population of 219 as recorded in the 2016 census. This former market town has lost almost all the businesses it once had, now without a supermarket or petrol station (though it has two pubs and two small shops). However, a new tourist hostel opened by recently retired TD Michael Ring, when he was a government minister, brought hope of a visitor bounty for the area. Instead, in 2023, the hostel was acquired for direct provision accommodation for around 120 North African refugees (or more than half the town’s population), speaking at least five different languages. The parish national school had to literally beg for resources to cope with the sudden demand placed on them without warning, while the local community was deliberately kept in the dark by authorities who refused to answer their questions as to what was happening or when, initially implying 50 Ukrainians were moving in.
For context, the Republican outcry over too many immigrants being settled in Springfield, Ohio (where Donald Trump falsely claimed immigrants were eating cats and dogs) saw newly-arrived Haitians immigrants make up 20% of the city’s population and unlike in Ballycastle, they are welcome to work legally in the local economy.
Senior local authority officials have long displayed this disdainful regard to local communities and ‘ordinary’ people, more akin to the patriarchal attitudes of the nineteenth-century Poor Law Guardians than modern accountable public servants. The present-day council chamber in Castlebar has elected councillors, representing the Mayo people, being physically looked down on by council officials, who sit elevated above them in a glorious metaphor of who really runs the local authority.
This almost colonial ethos of the council’s executive has seen the ploughing of millions of euros into the former gentry homes of the Bourkes in Ballina (now the Mary Robinson Centre) and Moorehall. The former is an expensive building in search of a real purpose, the latter a poignant ruin. This is in stark contrast with the Michael Davitt Museum which languishes underfunded in Straide and even had to close for a year, only kept alive by remarkable staff and volunteers.
The establishment has never been comfortable with Davitt, the hero of the ordinary people of county Mayo, banishing his name to the tax office and a bridge. Meanwhile, John Healy’s own name rejoices in a wet conifer wood outside of Charlestown which was officially opened by a blustering Padraig Flynn, then EC Commissioner. A recent travel review describes it now as ‘a forgotten memorial, the John Healy Forest Park lies neglected and overgrown on the old Dublin road’.
Official Ireland has thus clearly demonstrated its cultural priorities and they are not those of the threatened rural communities of the West who have lived here for countless generations but are now in the twilight of ethnic eradication. Little to no value has been placed on the human capital of those who call North Mayo home, but when these people are gone, with their traditions, stories, memories, games, Hiberno-English accents, farms, and names of fields and villages, they are gone forever. Instead, they will be fondly recalled during nostalgic RTÉ documentaries with Liam Neeson’s narration set to the music of Enya or in the glossy pages of Fáilte Ireland guidebooks, celebrating the empty roads along the Wild Atlantic Way and beneath the shadows of slowly spinning wind turbines strung across the hilly skylines.
The establishment’s cynicism towards North Mayo is unfortunately matched by a deep-rooted local fatalism and an unhealthy regard for authority. We are nice. We don’t want to rock the boat. Watch us at pedestrian crossings – where frail old men and women will hurry across, bowing and apologising for holding up traffic for a few seconds – even as they are clearly legally entitled to do so. I watched both fascinated and saddened, while then doing my best to fight the same urge in downtown Los Angeles, and often failing. Our forefathers’ anger has been smothered out of us by decades of emigration, Catholic church subservience and the emasculation of our personal agency by bureaucrats and EU subsidies. We are the embodiment of the old saying, ‘Mayo, God help us’.
Death of a community
I grew up aware of a cultural denigration of our rural life by those who John Healy pointedly directed his anger at. Where traditional small farms and country accents were mocked by an Ireland keen to leave such uncivilised reminders behind. The brightest and boldest of us were educated to escape, leaving behind the more conservative and inhibited, encouraged by both EU and State bureaucrats to see themselves as supplicants, without agency, to be satisfied with direct payments or ‘handouts’.
Even the language used in official policies betrayed an emasculating regard of farmers who were encouraged to compete in how deserving of aid they were, often bitterly contesting the classification of living in a severely disadvantaged over a merely disadvantaged area.
Horace Plunkett’s ethos of empowering cooperative movements is now supplanted by a bureaucratic top-down system of infinite regulations and data-heavy schemes, dictating to farmers how, when and where to manage their fields and livestock. This encourages, in turn, the age-old instinct of those robbed of power to blur their compliance with authority when possible. Now the successors of the Year of the French, of the Land League, of the United Irish League (which ended landlordism), which all erupted first in county Mayo, have turned into pale shadows of muted protest and fatalistic acceptance that North Mayo will continue to lose its vital native population until it is just a big empty Wild Nephin National Park.
Ironically, at a time when there was never as much funding available to local communities, there was never less effective leadership to use these resources in a transformative way. In the absence of any local authority motivation for creative and ambitious plans to sustain and regenerate rural communities (which they actually once aspired to), there is no other officially recognised mechanism to do so.
The Irish state has always sought the centralisation of power. The abolishment of the Urban District Councils by Phil Hogan in 2014 was just the latest in a trend beginning with the removal of the Rural District Councils at the birth of the Free State. Later, the abolishment of domestic rates in 1978 denied any ability of local authorities to be directly accountable through local taxation.
In turn, county councillors have almost no real power to influence the actions of council officials, who effectively run local government. Meanwhile, officialdom pays token lip service to the idea of community empowerment, but in fact, there is no ground-level democratic system of governance in Ireland. On paper, the so-called Public Partnership Network (PPN) appears full of vibrant community groups working in cooperation with local authorities to draw up and implement social and economic policies. In reality, such groups express their disillusionment at the lack of any real collaboration with county councils (at least outside Dublin city).
Without any real power, regulation or official recognition, many volunteer groups (maybe most) are inexpertly managed, lack mandates to implement real change and are often run without elections or regular meetings. It’s not really their fault, as they have no official decision-making role in any of their communities. Thus, they are not the advocacy vehicles that can be expected to provide the vision, drive and cohesion to reverse the local demographic decline, especially without an integrated and overarching plan run by a well-funded and effective regional body.
A team of consultants was brought in by the Oweninny Wind Farm Community Fund in 2022 and tasked with consulting with surrounding communities over the best development plans for each district within the fund area. This industrial-scale wind farm is constructed on the site of the old Bord na Móna peatlands, which supplied fuel to the Bellacorick Power Station.
This community fund makes a considerable annual windfall available to local communities for their betterment, as compensation for the installation of these massive turbines in their midst. The fund was quickly co-opted by Mayo County Council on its inception in order to manage its largesse, taking guidance from their consultants’ report.
With Moygownagh staring down the barrel of cultural eradication and demographic collapse, the top line of its draft Community Action Plan (which had taken almost 18 months to develop) inexplicably read: “Moygownagh will become a more elderly-friendly, inclusive and diverse community...”
These few words of inane marketing talk enraged me more than I expected a piece of paper to ever do. As I explained to the consultant responsible, ‘inclusivity and diversity’ could only be considered a problem here if there were actually enough people living in the parish, while soon only elderly people would be left in the place – friendly or not. But at least, I supposed, the graveyard would be well tended, with ramps for wheelchairs.
The whispered shockwaves of Mitchell’s closure swept through North Mayo and into the online diaspora. Yet by reading local newspapers or even the parish bulletin one would never know as innate fatalism took hold again. Instead, GAA notices mixed with happy school children, and busy CE workers continued to adorn the weekly newsletter, without any mention of the loss. As the empty buildings stood increasingly gaunt in the heart of the village, excited rumours swirled of potential buyers only to then dejectedly evaporate. An urgent public meeting organised by the local GAA club ‘to discuss the recent closure of the shop, Post Office, hardware and public house business in the parish and any possible solutions or suggestions, short or long term that may come from the floor’ was set for July 22. However, within a few days the meeting was abruptly cancelled, with whispered suggestions it was ‘too soon’ or not the right thing to do.
As the weeks crept into months, any momentum to ‘do something’ dissipated and it ceased being mentioned. Cars now pass up and down the road without slowing, their drivers barely glancing aside at the growing shadows of the darkened fuel pump canopy. The heart of another rural community has stopped beating, without a whimper of protest. Perhaps if John Healy could now see the death of this Irish community, he would realise, that while everyone wrung their hands and insisted it should stop, few really ever said so and meant it.