Communicating Europe: Hear Us

By Aidan Barry

Communicating Europe Participant

Just look at what has been achieved by IRD Duhallow. Jobs, crèches, environmental protection, and much more. Young people staying where beforehand there was flight and rural population malaise, a transformation due substantially to local community workers and EU support.

Subsidiarity is a principle at the heart of the functioning of the EU. It is the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level. Does that feel to you like how we do things in Ireland? Many think otherwise. Tony O’Grady, a community development practitioner quoted in Finola Kennedy’s ‘Local Matters’ published last year, claims that a major imbalance has developed in government-supported community development, so that the more local and community-centred approach ‘has been effectively obliterated in favour of the more centralised and prescriptive approach’.

Why is the tendency to centralise. Are power dynamics getting in the way? Could a paternal approach apply - a view among experts that local people cannot be trusted to identify what is needed in their own communities? Whatever the reason, we have not embraced the principle of subsidiarity. This matters. The difference is whether we get a say in what affects us in our community or not.

Our people want to take responsibility for ourselves. We want decisions to be taken openly and as locally to us as is practicable. We want subsidiarity. When our representatives don’t hear, let us raise our voices!