Here's an article I wrote for the Moyross Voice.

Two intertwined facts convince me that the Regeneration project must be completed, and ahead of schedule. First, more than 20,000 people are signing on the Live Register in Limerick alone. Second, nearly 6,000 of these are young men under 25, with no more education than a Leaving Certificate, most likely unemployed for the first time following the collapse of construction in the region. These men are builders. The regeneration agency wants in the business of building and rebuilding. The local community, and Limerick’s wider community, will benefit if the government targets funds for the immediate fulfilment of the agency’s plans.

Figure 1: Numbers of young men on social welfare have increased sharply. The Regeneration project could alleviate much of this type of unemployment. Source: CSO Live Register tables.

If it did nothing else, the Regeneration project would provide employment for thousands of these young men—not to mention young women—and so inject much needed capital into the local economy through their wages at a time when local consumption of goods and services is flagging, forcing employers to reduce their staff levels and rein in inventory orders, further contributing to the economic malaise we find ourselves in.

I propose that the Regeneration agency be given priority over all capital spending projects in the country for this simple reason: quite aside from the potential benefits to the populations of Moyross, Southill, Ballinacurra Weston, and St. Mary’s Park, building the Northside and Southside projects simultaneously over a three year period will result in a regeneration for the wider community.  If increased borrowings by the Irish government are required to achieve this aim, then I believe the potential benefits outweigh the costs of servicing any borrowing to fund such an expansion of the project.

Great care must be taken when rolling the Regeneration project out. The project aims to achieve the laudable ‘soft’ targets of reducing criminality, increasing social inclusion, more effective public service provision, increasing population health and the general quality of life for residents, increasing literacy, and, perhaps most importantly, allowing the communities the freedom to decide their own route to economic and social prosperity, as they define it.

The Regeneration project itself is an exercise in ‘hard’ targets: numbers of buildings built, community gardens planted, infrastructural initiatives set up. It is not clear to me how the introduction of these hard targets maps onto the soft targets the vision statements for both Northside and Southside strands of the project clearly wish and hope for. Even the vision statement for the Southside strand defines the physical environment as “the facilitator of regeneration”, but there is no clear link between the physical environment and the social benefits this new environment might generate.

I don’t deny the need for a new and well-imagined space to live and work in. Houses are machines for living in, and you need good houses to live well. But, I believe we are not precise enough on how much benefit these new houses and other ‘hard’ targets will be to the local communities. There is means to gain that precision.

There is an urgent need for benchmarking of the current health states of the local population, their median literacy rates, and so forth, as well as articulating clearly their expectation of what ‘success’ might look like, in a much more concrete from than the vision statements currently do. Only then, with a clear measure of where these diverse communities are, can we judge the successes and failures of the large-scale changes to the residential landscape the Regeneration project envisages.

I believe the Regeneration agency will work, and it should be funded as a matter of urgency. I also believe an untested and large-scale resettlement plan created many of the areas currently requiring Regeneration in the early 1970’s, and so I advise caution, careful thinking, and most importantly, research and benchmarking.  UL is in a position to provide these services, and my colleagues’ collective expertise should be put to use in surveying and assessing some of the communities the University was created, in part, to serve.