The Government released its report on rural development last Monday. The commission was chaired by Pat Spillane, the former Kerry football star, and engaged in wide-ranging consultations around the country.

Rural towns and villages are, with a few exceptions, not sharing in whatever economic recovery is under way.The growth in employment appears to be concentrated, so far anyway, in Dublin and the other main cities. The report documents what has been happening in recent years and makes a series of recommendations.

The geographical pattern of population change in Ireland has altered over recent decades. Rural depopulation has been replaced with, in large parts of the country, the suburbanisation of the countryside and some of the fastest rates of population growth have been outside urban areas. This is particularly noticeable in Leinster but it is also clear from the data elsewhere.

Rural counties which had experienced population loss for a century and a half began to share in the national population increase. But the bubble concealed some long-term trends, now painfully visible in the decline of the smaller towns and villages.

Warren Buffett, the legendary American investor, observed that when the tide goes out, the wreckage on the foreshore becomes visible.

The housing bubble spread to rural areas where builders could obtain planning permission not readily available in Dublin and the other cities. They chose locations where they could build, not where they could sell.

Effects

There are two consequences. The first is that the ghost estates disfiguring many of these rural towns, too far from Dublin and the other cities and, in many cases, are likely to be a write-off. There are no ghost estates in Dublin. But there has also been consequences for employment and retailing.

A generation of rural residents obtained employment, now vanished, in the construction bubble and the longer term decline in many rural areas was concealed.

The ghost estates are co-located with de-tenanted retail outlets, closed pubs and a feeling that something must be done to arrest these disturbing patterns.

It is important to be clear that what has happened since the bubble burst is the resumption of some trends that had been firmly in place before it started. One of these is the geographical concentration of retailing, made possible by the huge increase in private car ownership over the last 50 years. This trend is irreversible.

The number of retail outlets in the smaller towns and villages had been declining since the 1950s before the bubble came along, interrupting the process for a decade. The bubble did further damage through encouraging over-investment in retail capacity in many of the main provincial towns. Cheap premises are available in these regional centres whenever retail activity recovers and it seems unlikely that the shops will be reopening in the smaller centres.

Another long-term trend has been the preference of multinationals for locating new activities in the larger, established centres. This is clear not just in the Dublin region but also in Cork, Galway and a few other provincial towns and cities.

Employers will naturally be anxious to find locations which offer a significant labour pool as well as back-up services and transport links. The construction of the motorway network has expanded the catchment area of the larger centres, making them more competitive as locations for firms that have a choice. It is difficult for public policy to swim against this particular tide.

The report is thin on recommendations. There are common-sense recommendations on infrastructure provision, including better broadband service and a reality check about the road investment programme.

While the main inter-urban roads have been improved beyond recognition, making the country a more competitive location for internationally mobile business, the secondary road network is poor in many areas. The impression has been created that the road network is fixed, which is not really the case. Even on the principal inter-urban routes, notably Cork to Limerick and Limerick to Galway, the job is only half-finished.

It is, however, unrealistic to expect that better broadband speeds or better roads will reverse the long-term trends that were concealed by the bubble. The hierarchy of towns and villages around Ireland was established before the arrival of widespread access to personal mobility. The willingness to commute longer distances for both work and shopping lies behind the suburbanisation of the countryside, which is a Europe-wide phenomenon. A prosperous future for rural Ireland is not in conflict with the success of the larger urban centres.