Our turn: Changing landscape symbolises hope

Eighteen months ago, the carparks in Dublin's Ballymun housing estate were empty.

Most of the estate's 26,000 residents were on benefits. The postwar tower blocks were literally cracking apart. Patrick Brennan's shop in a derelict 1940s van in one of the vacant lots symbolised a social landscape without hope.

"Over the years it became seen as a sort of purgatory," said longtime resident Noel Martin.

Today, Mr Brennan's shop is still there. But one by one, the towers are being demolished. And, says Ballymun housing taskforce manager Brendan Boyle, the mood has been transformed.

"Now residents are fighting over the parking spaces," he says.

"They have got jobs. If you have all that extra income coming into an area that was very depressed, that in itself will turn around perceptions."

Ballymun shows that when economic growth is strong enough, even people in families in which whole generations have been unemployed can find jobs.

Through rapid economic growth, averaging 9 per cent a year in the past seven years, the proportion of Irish people in paid work rose by more than a quarter, from 44.5 per cent of those aged 15 and over in 1993 to 56.9 per cent last year.

New Zealand's paid workers increased in the same period from 54.7 per cent to 60.8 per cent of the 15-plus population, largely because of women shifting into the workforce.

In Ireland, too, there has been a steady increase in the female workforce, but the economic boom has also generated jobs for men who had been on the dole for years.

Noel Martin, who is on the board of a training agency at Ballymun, says so many young people on the estate are now finding jobs that his agency has switched its focus from its original brief of the under-18s to the 25-30 age group - "often young parents with children who want part-time jobs.

"There is still a huge dependency culture in this country," he says. "Most of the people coming in have to have more or less one-on-one training because of the number of psychological problems, health and family problems."

Daniel Chandler, a young New Zealander who married an Irish woman and now runs a course for 15 to 18-year-olds in Ballymun, says his main focus is on boosting the teenagers' self-confidence and life skills. He recruits students from local schools - often those with drug problems whose teachers are struggling to cope with them.

"They are not motivated to go and work.

"Their parents - all they have seen is them sitting round being unemployed. It doesn't even figure in their minds that they need to go out and get jobs."

As well as covering life skills and career options, he teaches the youngsters enough computer skills to pass the European Computer Driver's Licence, a widely recognised basic qualification.

"My whole goal is to get them interested in further training."

The six-week course he is now running has been going since May last year, and 84 per cent of its graduates have gone on to further training or employment.

Meanwhile Ballymun itself is being transformed. In place of the tower blocks, terrace-style two, three and four-storey homes are being built, five "neighbourhood centres" are planned to replace Patrick Brennan's truck-shop, and a "top-of-the-range, 21st century technology park" is going up.

"It will turn the area around from something that was more suitable to Eastern Europe to a more complete, open society," says Mr Boyle.

"The changes you see would not be possible without that global context because the national economy would still be a failure."

Our turn

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Simon Collins

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