On September 13th, 1991, Alex Perkins, a consultant ecologist and adviser to the Green Party, wrote to Wicklow County Council to protest at the council's plans for a road-widening scheme at the Glen of the Downs, a wooded and scenic area of Co Wicklow.
Mr Perkins, who lives locally, has been conducting wildlife surveys of the glen for over 30 years. He says he was horrified by the plans, which would see up to 40 per cent of the glen's wetland, ash and hazel trees being lost to the roadway. Further inspection of the plans revealed that a stream along the glen floor was to be piped and covered in.
Mr Perkins claims that he got little positive response either from the council or its elected members, but he did secure the backing of the newly-elected councillor for Greystones, Ms Nuala Ahern, later to become an MEP.
Undaunted by the council's reaction, he contacted the Office of Public Works and the Department of the Environment, bodies he says he was well used to dealing with in the course of his work as an ecology consultant on planning matters.
In essence, Mr Perkins proposed moving the alignment of the road westward at the southern and mid-section of the glen to obviate the need for culverting the stream and losing the wetlands.
He also proposed that the road be moved eastward at the northern end. He recommended narrowing the road from 33 metres to 25 as it passed through the glen, and the complete elimination of a flyover at the entrance to the Glenview Hotel.
Mr Perkins claims the success of his approach was proved when, on January 7th, 1994, Wicklow County Council wrote to its members telling them that the then minister for the environment, Mr Michael Smith, had certified the route taking on board the recommendations to realign the road.
However, not everybody was completely happy with the compromise, and Mr Jim Fitzpatrick, another local, complained that the county council and the Department of the Environment, as developers, were "acting as judge and jury on their own plans".
Mr Fitzpatrick also claims that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was never done on the realigned section of the road, an issue he says undermines the legal basis of the whole project.
"The only thing to do then was to go to court. But, with few households directly affected, it was impossible to raise the funds. In many ways it was a defeat", he said yesterday, adding: "The council could do as it liked."
The arrival last summer of the first "eco-warriors" brought the dispute into a new phase, that of direct action. Not surprisingly, there are two views on the level of support for the "warriors" locally. Mr Perkins says that if he and the local Greens had camped in the trees in 1991 "the road would be a direct line through the glen by now and the stream and the wetlands would be lost".
However, at a seminar hosted by Trinity College Greens last November, criticism was made of the Glen of the Downs Greens for their lack of wholehearted support. In a statement read out at the Trinity meeting, Wicklow County Council said that it had prepared the EIS "not because it was required to do so by law, but because of its own concern for the environmentally-sensitive area of the Glen of the Downs".
The council said that 1,700 trees would need to be felled for the road, representing 2 per cent of the woodland, or three acres out of 170. The council committed itself to planting a similar number of trees and concluded that it had "achieved the necessary balance between the environmental issues and the economic need to improve this road, which is part of Euro Route 1".