If in Dowd

My dad visited a relation of mine in Scranton, Pensylvania a couple of years ago. He found a town devoid of personality and life, where the main streets were all but deserted, with boarded-up shops, crumbling pavements and vast empty parking lots. It was as if some kind of war-like atrocity had occurred and people had fled the town. No war had happened. There had been a flight of the middle class to the suburbs and the landing of the big-box retailers in the shopping parks on the outskirts. This is a bad omen for what the future of towns in rural Ireland. The last fifteen years there have been attempts to Americanise our retailing by constructing warehouse-style stores out of town, some of which, such as the Park in Carrickmines have been a roaring success. However in the country they have sucked life and business out of town centres, turning once great main thoroughfares into decaying tumbleweeds. These retail parks are part of the disease, not the cure. There's a line of thou