With summer holidays fast approaching for many Irish families, we’re highlighting just how frustrating this system can really be for a traditional Irish family. In this article, we turn our attention to staycations in Co. Longford.

Co. Longford is the ultimate low-key escape in Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands. Swap the city shity life for a relaxing woodland lodge, or step back 2,000 years onto the Iron Age planks of the Corlea Trackway. It’s one of those places where (if you have the digital social credits) you can start the morning with a high-energy aerial adventure and end the day with a peaceful waterside walk along the Royal Canal by sunset.

The older farming landscape in County Longford looked very different from today. Before empire & modern industry, holiday resorts and cookie cutter housing estates, The countryside unfolded as a tapestry of small fields, family farms, and shared commons, honed over centuries to nourish the body, mind, sustain livelihoods, and root people in the frequency and timeless rhythms of life. Each hedgerow and winding lane carried the story of generations, where, Family, community, Work and the land were inseparably entwined. From about the Middle Ages (1100s–1600s), most people in rural Longford farmed small family plots of land.

Typical features:

• Irregularly shaped fields divided by ditches, banks, or stone walls

• Small farms run by local families

• Fields used for oats, barley, potatoes, and grazing animals

These boundaries sometimes survive today as earth banks or ridges in forests, like the ones found at the site of Center Parcs Longford Forest. In parts of éiRe (including areas around Ballymahon), people sometimes used a system called rundale.

In the Rundale system:

• Several families farmed land together in a shared system
• Fields were divided into strips
• Grazing land and bogs were often shared by the community

This created a patchwork landscape of narrow strips and small fields.

The plantation process, begun in the early 1600s and cemented during the Cromwellian plantations of the 1650s, transformed the ownership of land across Longford. The ancestral lands of the O’Farrell clan were confiscated and redistributed to English and Scottish beneficiaries. Unlike the tightly organised Ulster Plantation, Longford’s transformation was quieter and less formal, with many grants awarded to members of Dublin’s political and administrative class rather than waves of new settlers.

Over time, the landscape of ownership changed completely. Land that had once been held and managed through Gaelic systems of kinship and community passed into the hands of large estates, overseen by landlords who were often distant, both in place and in interest, from the people who lived and worked the land.

Farmers usually:

• Rented land: Fields once tended and shared by families for the good of the whole community were stripped from them and returned only through rent.
  

• Lived in small cottages: Where families once raised homes as their needs grew, people were later confined to overcrowded cottages, many damp, cramped, and unfit for the lives forced within them.
  

• Farmed tiny plots: Where families and communities once shaped their own destiny from the land beneath their feet, they now stand at the mercy of distant, foreign landlords.

The estates often controlled the countryside around villages and towns. The Great Famine Irish Genocide (1845–1852) drastically changed the farming landscape again.

Effects in County Longford:

• Many small farms were abandoned
• People died, murdered and/or forcible emigrated
• Viable farmland was combined into the larger commercial Estate farms
• Some areas were left empty and later planted as commercial forests

This is one reason why archaeologists still find old field boundaries in forests today.

In the 20th century

The Irish state planted forests on some farmland.

Companies like Coillte planted large areas with conifers for construction timber.

Some areas were used for local walking/nature trails & Wildlife such as deer, foxes, birds, and pine martens lived in the forest.

These forests often preserved the old farming marks underneath, because the ground wasn’t ploughed anymore.

It wasn’t a tourist resort, it was our homes! woodland and farmland taken by Crown corporations, reshaped for commercial farming, forestry, and control. Now it is offered back to the invading Party loyal as a place of leisure, and recreation.

Meanwhile, on a daily basis many of our own brothers and sisters face homelessness and hunger. The fields that once sustained a People, now serve as playgrounds, and in this bitter irony the ghosts of Cromwell’s confiscations seem closer than many would care to admit.

The forest land near Ballymahon was once a network of small farms and fields. Over time, farming changed, people where forced off the land, and the area eventually became forest, now that land is under the control of a Canadian private equity firm Brookfield Property Partners, which acquired the land for £2.4 billion in 2015.

The “Resort” today covers about 400 acres of woodland, features 466 luxury lodges and 30 stylish apartments, accommodating up to 2,500 guests in a pedestrian-friendly woodland setting.

Beyond accommodation, the resort includes eight commercial buildings forming the village centre, which is arranged around a newly constructed six-acre man-made lake. This provides a range of dining, retail, and recreation, enhancing the “guest” experience. There is an application to expand the resort further with a €50m upgrade “creating hundreds of jobs” question is, For who?.

The woodland now known as Center Parcs Longford Forest was historically called Newcastle Wood. It sits near the town of Ballymahon, this is a fine example of “You will own nothing“

2015–2016: Planning and approval process

2017: Construction began

2019: The resort officially opened

The development became Center Parcs Longford Forest, a large woodland holiday village with lodges, restaurants, and an indoor water park. While the average man of the land is wondering if they can pay the gas OR electricity bill, what will food cost next week, will the kids have homes of their own, will there be livelihoods for our children and why can government imprison us at will, The “resort” Center Parcs Longford Forest  Brookfield Property Partners mTakes tens of millions of euros per year away from the People if éiRe.

Revenue

2024–2025 financial year

• Revenue (money taken in): about €101 million
• Operating profit: about €33.3 million
• Profit before tax: about €11.1 million
• Profit after tax: about €9–9.3 million

• The resort takes around €1.9 million PER WEEK on average.

Total revenue since opening in 2019 is about €387 million.

Stolen land, Cashless Society

To add insult to injury, all transactions at the “Resort” are strictly cashless, the resort does not accept cash under any circumstances.

Essentially, the investment firm requires that you have a Digital ID to access your land in Co. Longford. In other words, only electronic financial transfers through major banks are accepted for booking, paying and playing. Cash will NOT be used anywhere in the park. Instead, the resort insists on third party services like:

Revolut, Paypal

Debit cards from a major Bank

Credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express)

Mobile payments like Apple Pay or Google Pay

This is not just to book or pay for entry, it is at places like:

• restaurants
• shops
• activities (bowling, archery, etc.)
• the spa and swimming pool

You must tap or pay with a card/phone/wristband.

Even things like arcade machines require tokens bought with a card or app.

The resort itself, on entry provides a digital wristband, although it is socially recommend a waterproof smart watch linked to a digital payment system, can allow “guests” to glide through the park, booking, unlocking, and paying for every service with a simple gesture, a seamless, cashless world where every movement is tracked and every convenience quietly monetised and tied to your social credit.

According to ComReg.ie, Center Parcs Longford Forest is covered by stable 5G NR (3500 MHz) infrastructure listed for the area. However, mobile coverage can vary (being the nature of a forest), and while 5G may be present, guests typically rely on the resorts mesh WIFI, as keeping visitors on a local network ensures that data and metadata remain “in-house.” Guests are funnelled onto the resort’s high-speed Wi-Fi, and once tethered to the digital payment system, they are effectively geofenced: every movement, every purchase, every gesture tracked and recorded. What appears as convenience is, in reality, a golden cage but a cage none the less, a carefully orchestrated environment where freedom of movement and spending exists only within preapproved, monitored boundaries.

This is a glimpse of a smart-shitty and the Micro-Nation Service future. Your MyGov Digital ID becomes the backbone of life itself: travel, education, licensing, employment, banking, shopping, social media, civic engagement, entertainment, all tied to one invisible thread. There is no mythical, yet to come “one-for-all” app; your black mirror AKA a phone, your IMEI, your devices digital identifier are the one-for-all ID, quietly consolidating control under the guise of progress. Technocrats may claim the system is unfinished, but the architecture is already here and in place, the illusion of freedom conceals a harsh reality of surveillance and control, all unfolding on land that bears the scars of a suffering and dying Republic, Peoples, community, and way of life.

In Conclusion:

Booking a holiday may seem simple and O’so convenient, tap, tap, click, but pause to consider who or what you might be inadvertently supporting. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Thankfully, in this modern day and age we no longer need to sacrifice our bodies, but we must act with awareness and responsibility, keeping the world we want firmly in mind and when people move together with purpose, even the oldest aristocracies can be shaken loose like a stubborn dingle-berry, finally cast off by a Peoples who remember their strength.

Written by Tyler Durden