DONEGAL’S struggle with the recession has been laid bare in a report by a leading international business newspaper.
Financial Times reporter Jamie Smyth spent several days in Milford.
And his report on the newspaper’s website today shows how 41 members of the local GAA club have left to start new lives abroad since 2008.
The latest to leave is 28-year-old player Anthony McPaul.
“The town is dying on its feet. The two banks have closed, ripping the commercial heart out of the town,” the Editor of the Tirconaill Tribune John McAteer tells Smyth.
“Milford is just a microcosm of a wider malaise in rural Ireland. In Donegal the only export we have is our young people,” he says.
Smyth reveals that of the 144 multi-national companies which invested in Ireland last year, 75% were in Dublin and Cork.
Just one came to Donegal.
Reporter Smyth writes: “Letterkenny, which was Ireland’s fastest growing town during the boom, is littered with ghost estates and half empty retail parks. Shopkeepers have suffered a huge drop in business since the crisis struck in 2008 and are not yet seeing a recovery.”
The article is here