FERMANAGH’S rural communities have been left reeling once again this week, with news of the loss of even more vital services from the local area, this time a school and a bank.
Calls are growing for urgent action to be taken by the powers-that-be to help halt the haemorrhaging of services and protect rural communities after it was announced on Monday that both the Bank of Ireland (BoI) in Lisnaskea and St Mary’s High School in Brollagh were to close.
Cllr John Coyle, who is a past pupil of St Mary’s and experienced the aftermath of the closure of the BoI in Belleek in recent years, said he believed legislation urgently needed to be put to the Assembly to address the continued loss of services communities and redress the rural imbalance.
“The rural proofing bill is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said, of the current legislation.
“It’s just a box ticking exercise, it doesn’t protect the general public in a rural area and big companies can just say they are pulling out of here and there.”
Cllr Anthony Feely said he and Cllr Sheamus Greene were in the process of setting up a rural committee on the Council, to help lobby for rural matters.
“The whole thing is a mess,” he said, in reference to both the Brollagh and Lisnaskea announcements, adding that the siege on rural services was happening “across the board”.
In Lisnaskea, Cllr Garbhan McPhillips said the closure of BoI in the county’s second town was “another attack on our rural communities, rural Fermanagh being hit again”, while MLA Rosemary Barton said rural communities always paid “the price of failure.”
To read more on both these stories see this week’s Fermanagh Herald. Can’t get to the shop to collect your copy? No problem! You can download a copy straight to your device by following this link https://bit.ly/3gOl8G0
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