Letters / Lowest form of morality
Although I am no longer a North Roe resident, I still see it as home, and any form of threat to destabilise the community upsets me deeply.
Closing rural schools and ripping the heart out of a community for the sake of saving money is the lowest form of morality I can think of, whatever the potential savings.
I have spent a time reading through the proposal paper, and transcripts from the meeting. And plenty has been said about the affect it will have on the children, which are of course, the most important in this whole process.
I’d like to look at things from a slightly different perspective.
In North Roe, it’s a settled community, people tend to move there, and stay. SIC have had no input into North Roe in the past 26 years since I have been born, other than building a bus stop, and speed limit signs for the school. So investment, in North Roe, has been near non-existent.
It took the ingenuity of one member of the community to build two houses that have been rented out, one, to a family, the other to a young couple, recently married (if memory serves me, there were around 40 applicants for these two houses, but I’m happy to be corrected).
Another house in North Roe that came up through the housing association has been rented by a young mum whose daughter will be going to school in the next few years. Another couple moved into the areas in the last few years with children of school age. The last house built in North Roe houses a family with two children. I’m aware of another couple with a baby in the area also and another young couple recently engaged within the school catchment area.
None of this has been influenced by any drive by the council to provide North Roe with housing, or investment of any type.
If the initiative from the council was to run a consultation on interest in affordable housing in rural areas, wouldn’t it indicate whether it is sustainable to do so, I think you would be surprised by the results.
From experience, when living in Shetland, my wife and I had to rent privately in North Roe. No other property was available, although an approach to the council to rent the school house was quashed saying “we could put you in there until more suitable accommodation became available”. I would have liked to have known what was more suitable than a house in walking distance of my parents’, grandparents’ and brother’s house was?
But I guess that’s another example of the council’s failure to understand the needs of its entire population, and not just the central belt. It’s ironic that Shetland suffers the same treatment from the Scottish and UK parliaments, which is often moaned about, but sees fit to do it to its own people.
I guess my letter is a plea to the council, to look at ways to rebuild these fragile communities rather than tearing them apart.
Lee Goodlad
Blackburn, Aberdeenshire
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