What the Mullingar Declaration means for Mullingar
Mullingar SEC
The recent adoption of the Mullingar Declaration, ‘A Future Worth Staying For’, places our town at the centre of an important European conversation: how we create communities where people can genuinely choose to live, work and build their future.
It is a simple idea: the ‘right to stay’. That means ensuring towns like Mullingar offer, as well as housing, real opportunity, quality of life and a healthy environment. It recognises that people should not feel they are forced to leave due to a lack of jobs, services or a connection to the place.
For Mullingar, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
Mullingar is already growing. Hundreds of new homes are being built and a rising population points to a town on the move. But growth alone is not enough. As we have seen in the past, development has often outpaced the services needed to support it, including public transport, healthcare, schools and community infrastructure.
If the Mullingar Declaration is to mean anything here, it must push us to rethink what kind of town we are becoming.
First, we need to rebalance growth towards quality of life. For the physical development of our town, that means compact development, a vibrant town centre, and neighbourhoods where people can walk, cycle and easily access their daily needs.
It means investing in public transport and reconnecting the town to its wider region. A town designed around people, not cars, is a town people choose to stay in.
Cars have their place and purpose, but we can’t design primarily with cars in mind or we will end up with an unattractive and unusable town centre.
Secondly, we need to strengthen the local economy in a way that is rooted in place. A ‘future worth staying for’ is one where jobs are meaningful, diverse and connected to the local community.
Supporting local enterprise, circular economy initiatives and local innovation will be key to creating new, high quality jobs, reducing commuting and building resilience.
Thirdly, Mullingar sits within a rich agricultural landscape and any ‘future worth staying for’ has to include a secure and sustainable food system. In an increasingly uncertain world, food security is becoming a local as well as a national issue.
The best food supply chain is the shortest one. You only have to look at where the vegetables come from in the supermarket to know that we have some of the longest (and therefore most expensive) food supply chains in the world and that makes us vulnerable to global disruption.
Shortening our food supply chains by supporting local producers, regional processing and farmers markets can strengthen resilience, reduce emissions and keep more value within the local economy. At the same time, farming practices that enhance soil health, water quality and biodiversity will be essential to protecting the natural systems on which both agriculture and the wider community depend.
Fourthly, climate resilience must move from policy to practice. The most important word in the Mullingar Declaration is ‘future’ and particularly the type of future we are creating for our children. Will it be one where climate disasters are inevitable because of the decisions we are making today to delay the reduction of carbon emissions? If so, we are creating a difficult life for our children and we have begun to see those patterns emerge in our weather this year. The worst climate futures can, however, still be avoided if we act urgently to both reduce emissions and to adapt to the changes that are already inevitable.
Mullingar, being the county’s Decarbonisation Zone, has the potential to act as a testbed for decarbonisation and climate action at a local level, but since its announcement a few years ago, there has been little progress on it. A Decarbonisation Zone means, among other things, scaling up renewable energy, retrofitting homes and supporting community-led initiatives that reduce emissions while lowering costs for households.
Imagine if Mullingar had the first 100% community-owned solar farm in the country? Well, it’s within touching distance. A solar farm on the former landfill site at Marlinstown has been six years in the making by the Mullingar Sustainable Energy Community, but it now needs support from local and national authorities to get it over the line.
Fifthly, we need to make much more of our natural assets. Mullingar is uniquely positioned between two lakes and alongside the Royal Canal – a blue-green network that many towns would envy. Yet these are still underused as everyday spaces for recreation, wellbeing and nature restoration.
Protecting and enhancing these assets is not just an environmental issue; it is central to creating a place people feel connected to. These natural assets also provide an opportunity for Mullingar to be a leader in ecotourism, where the protection and restoration of the lakes is embedded in new tourism experiences.
While it might seem that all of the above aspects of life in Mullingar are competing and that we have to choose between them, they are not. In fact we will fail future generations if we continue to treat them as silos. Housing, enterprise, agriculture, education, good jobs, climate action, nature restoration, public transport, social cohesion, culture and the care for our most vulnerable people, must all be seen as part of the same connected system in our town.
That means considering the unintended consequences of supporting one area on another and seeking solutions that benefit all. It also means not long-fingering one while we sort another first. The Mullingar Declaration expects us to deliver these benefits simultaneously and we can.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to involve people. Plans and declarations will only go so far unless they are shaped and owned by the community. The success of Mullingar will depend on whether people feel they have a stake in its future.
The Mullingar Declaration challenges us to move beyond business as usual. It asks us to create a town that is not just growing, but thriving – socially, economically and environmentally, with these three elements seen as equally important.
If we take that challenge seriously, Mullingar can become a leading example of what a ‘future worth staying for’ actually looks like in practice.