Jane Suffin & Paul Forde – The Aldi Project in Boyle

The German visitors had seen the signs on The Crescent and came over to ask the obvious question. Why, in a town with this many old buildings and this much character, were people standing out on a Saturday fighting to bring in a German supermarket?

Jane Suffin explained it to them step by step. The car park. The jobs. The accommodation. What it would mean for the young people. When they walked off, she says, they understood.

That weekend, and online around it, the petition Jane started gathered 3,207 signatures in four days in support of Aldi’s plans for the old Candon’s site on Patrick Street. Jane and former postmaster Paul Forde sat down with Florence and Carlo, who were on the petition team with them, to talk about how it happened. This is not a neutral conversation, and nobody in it pretends to be.

The whole town was delighted

Jane starts at the beginning. Word went round the town that Aldi had applied for planning permission on the old Candon’s site, and she says it was like a light coming on. There was a future. There was hope. Roscommon County Council granted permission.

Then an appeal was lodged by Brian O’Sullivan, a man with an address in Co. Offaly, and everything stopped. The group held a protest in February. A decision date came and went, and then another. As Florence puts it, a decision could come tomorrow or it could come next year. People are left hanging.

“In a big city, it would be a very, very small project. For Boyle, it’s a massive, massive project.”

A massive, massive project

Jane is careful to say this is not about cheap groceries. She’s not talking about 10 cents off a loaf of bread. What she is talking about is 30 jobs in the shop, before anyone counts the construction work, along with car parking, accommodation and regeneration. And something harder to measure: the message it sends to anyone else weighing up Boyle. If Aldi can get permission, she says, maybe someone tries for a hotel. Maybe someone tries for a coffee shop.

She isn’t dismissive of what has opened in the town lately. Hairdressers and small places are all welcome, she says. Anything that opens in Boyle is welcome. But an investment of this size is a different thing altogether.

Batman Town

Where the project stands, as far as the group can gather, is waiting on a question about bats. Jane has had enough of that. Every time there’s a planning application in Boyle, she says, it’s bats, or it’s grass, or it’s something, and the place should nearly be rechristened Batman Town.

She is angrier about who lodged the appeal. In her view, someone from Offaly who has probably never seen Candon’s building, and hasn’t a bull’s notion what is in it, should not be able to hold up a project that means this much to Boyle and the surrounding areas. Later on she says the petition sends him a message to keep his nose out of what’s happening in Boyle, and she adds that “if people aren’t willing to put their own names to things, things should not be accepted.”

Her last word on it is short. “Boyle is our town, not your town. You look after your own town.”

Why are you fighting to have a German company come into your town?

It’s a fair question, and it came up online too. Carlo saw a comment under one of the posts sharing the petition in the Boyle Community Hub, telling people they were handing the money from their pocket to a German company. Carlo’s answer is that every other town is moving forward and Boyle should too. Nobody on the team is against local or Irish business. They want progress.

Florence goes further. In an ideal world, she says, everyone would still be going to the butcher’s and the bakery the way people did in Boyle years ago. That isn’t a reality for any town in Ireland now. People from Boyle already go to Aldi in Roscommon, in Longford, in Carrick-on-Shannon. A store in Boyle won’t change how people shop. It will change where the money gets spent.

If they don’t come in the door

Paul ran the Post Office, and he comes at it from behind the counter. The one thing any business needs is footfall. If people leave town to do their shopping, they might get their hair done while they’re there too, and the little hairdresser that has just opened in Boyle loses out.

He answers the German company point directly. A portion of the money people leave in any shop goes back out in pay packets, and he wants those paid in Boyle. Not Longford, not Roscommon, not Sligo, not Carrick.

“We want Boyle people to get that little pay packet every Friday.”

Jane adds that people already get the train from Boyle and further up the line to Aldi in Carrick, and while they’re there they go into the other shops as well. That’s the spending she wants kept at home. It will take time to balance out, she says, but everything balances out in time. If the town isn’t willing to welcome new business, it’s stuck in time.

“If you get people in the door, they will do business. If they’re not on the street, they won’t come in the door. If they don’t come in the door, your doors will close.”

You can have both

Florence raises the worry the German visitors had. Boyle is a historic town with lovely buildings and loads of character, and they could not see why anyone would want a supermarket in the middle of it. Jane’s answer is that if it’s done sympathetically, you can have both. An Aldi on Patrick Street is not going to take away from the look of the Abbey. She also points to a building going up elsewhere in the town at the minute, which she doesn’t think is in keeping with the architecture either.

It came from people in the surrounding areas

The petition came out of the protest. Jane says the February turnout was the best she had seen for anything in Boyle, and when word came through that there was still no decision date, she and Paul felt they had to be seen to be doing something. They came up with the petition between them, with Florence, Carlo and Danny joining in, not knowing how it would go.

It went. On the Friday and Saturday on The Crescent, and online, people came from Boyle, from Frenchpark, from Elphin, from Bunnanadden and elsewhere in Co. Sligo. A couple who come over from Manchester every year to go on the boats said they had to come up and sign because they want to be able to shop in Boyle. A couple from Frenchpark came down specially on the Friday so they would not have to go over to Carrick. A woman from Elphin who visits her mother in one of the nursing homes in Boyle said she just wants to see her mother and do all her shopping in the same town. A young lad told them his mother works in Aldi in Carrick, and that they live closer to Boyle, and he’d love her to get a job here. Boyle business owners came up to sign too, because they could see what it would do for their own trade.

Everyone, Florence says, had their own reason.

Blown it out of the park

Jane can’t remember a petition in Boyle getting anything close. You might get 50, 100 or 120 signatures, she says. This one got 3,207 in four days, and hundreds of conversations along with it. To her it means people are now willing to stand up, be seen, and fight for what they know is right for the town.

Carlo points out that it’s also a signal in a town that, like a lot of towns, can get fractured. Florence thinks about the people who would never post on social media, who still got the chance to say what they want.

“3,207 people, and those 7 are just as important as the other 3,200.”

What could it achieve, though?

Carlo puts the question some people have been asking on Facebook. The petition can’t change the outcome officially. So what is it for?

Paul hopes it shows An Coimisiún Pleanála that this is more than the construction of a shop. It’s the rebuilding of a town. And if there is a positive in the objection, he says, and there’s a positive in everything if you look far enough, it’s that the town is unified. Anyone thinking about Boyle, with hotel plans or a business of some sort, can rest assured the town will row in behind them. They’ll be back on The Crescent if they have to be. Everyone who signed, he says, can look back in a few years, when Aldi is there, and say they helped start it.

Jane is realistic. The petition won’t sway the decision. What it will do is show that people from the town, from outside it, and from other countries with connections to Boyle are behind the project. The plan, Florence says, is a cup of tea, a good bit of photocopying, and copies sent off to a number of different bodies. It is not going to sit on anyone’s desk.

If it’s a car, it’s a car

Near the end Paul says that if Boyle had more people like Jane it would be a better town. Florence agrees. Every town needs a Jane, she says. In a small town it’s often politics that divides people, and someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks stops everyone else censoring themselves.

Jane brushes it off. A town is bigger than any one person, she says, and this was a team with different views on some things and the same aim. She knows people think she’s blunt.

“If it’s a car, it’s a car, and there’s no beating around the bush to try and convince somebody that it’s a bicycle.”

She finishes where she started, with the people who came out. She’s proud of them, she says. She calls it a ray of hope.