Fintan O’Toole: Everywhere you look, Ireland has stark physical deficits

I am fortunate to be able to live much of the time in the beautiful village of Ballyvaughan in north Clare. It’s a gorgeous place, surrounded by the amazing Burren landscape and inhabited by a terrific community.

But when I step outside my door, the road is pitted and rutted like a badly tilled field. After rain – which is to say nearly all the time – you get a free shower as the cars hit the waterlogged potholes.

This is not a boreen. It’s part of the most successful Irish tourist brand, the Wild Atlantic Way. Tour buses, motorcyclists, tractors, RVs, cyclists and walkers pass along its scarred surface. And it just rots away.

Now and then the county council sends a contractor out to fill in a few of the potholes. But it never gets around to actually building what, in any other developed country, would count as a road.

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Picking my way along this rough track, and futilely trying to dodge another splashing, I come to the corner of a field where a new planning permission notice has just sprouted from the ditch. It’s great news: Uisce Éireann is going to build a wastewater treatment plant with a pumping station and sewer pipes.

It’s also, however, old news. Since I began coming to Ballyvaughan in the early 1980s, there has been talk of the urgent need to build a sewage treatment plant.

Similar planning signs have gone up before. We have occasional sightings of serious-looking women and men in hi-vis jackets with theodolites. We’ve even had diggers in the field, apparently preparing the ground.

And they vanish like figures from a hazily recalled dream. All that seems to happen is that the name of the public body applying for permission changes – Clare County Council became Irish Water which became Uisce Éireann. (I sometimes think that the reason Irish public bodies so love renaming themselves is because it gives the impression of movement without any need for the reality.)

Because what happens at the moment is that all the human waste we generate in and around the village goes straight into the harbour. It is completely untreated. To adapt what Brendan Behan once said about Dublin Bay, you don’t swim off Ballyvaughan, you just go through the motions.

Foul sewers

The official annual environmental report explains the situation in blunt terms: “Foul sewers convey wastewater to a holding tank at Ballyvaughan Quay which was constructed in the 1930s and which provides primary settlement only before discharging to the coastal water of Ballyvaughan Bay. The current wastewater treatment system in Ballyvaughan does not comply with urban waste water regulations.”

There are now nearly 400 Ukrainian refugees living in and around the village. There are pubs and restaurants and B&Bs and holiday cottages and a medical centre. And we all send our dishonourable discharges directly into the sea.

Charmingly, Uisce Éireann reports that it has no evidence of harmful effects on people or on shellfish from all of this effluent for the simple reason that it only monitors places where waste is treated. “Monitoring is not undertaken as there is currently no treatment.”

This is just one little place that I happen to know well, but I’m sure the same tale could be repeated all over Ireland. It’s not a story of places being undeveloped so much as them being – to coin a necessary Irish word – de-developed

Why is so much of Ireland still like this? Why, if it actually gets built in the coming years, will the Ballyvaughan water treatment works be up there with the ancient Roman Cloaca Maxima as one of the great wonders of civilisation?

The obvious explanation is that places like this have never been developed, that they’ve always existed in some primitive state of infrastructural backwardness. But if you take a walk around Ballyvaughan, you can see immediately that this is not so.

The most obvious pieces of infrastructure around the village are the two piers that define the bay. They were both built in the 19th century.

The tender for the building of the “old pier” was issued by the Office of Public Works in the middle of 1846 and the whole project was finished by 1848. The “new pier” on the north side of the bay was built in a matter of months in 1877 and 1878.

Strikingly, this new pier was decidedly “modern”. It was built with a new technology: concrete. The concrete blocks were cast on the site itself.

Clean water

Around the same time, Ballyvaughan also got another remarkable infrastructural innovation: one of the first reliable public water supplies in Ireland. Clean water was piped into the village from an artificial reservoir in the nearby hills.

So, if you were in this village 150 years ago, you would have felt thoroughly modern, with a concrete pier for steamers to come and go and cast-iron pipes bringing you fresh water for drinking, washing and flushing toilets. You would have had a very tangible sense that the public authorities could plan and build life-changing infrastructure quickly and efficiently.

This is just one little place that I happen to know well, but I’m sure the same tale could be repeated all over Ireland. It’s not a story of places being undeveloped so much as them being – to coin a necessary Irish word – de-developed.

It is one of the things that makes a lot of coastal Ireland in particular seem quite strange. So much of the infrastructure is literally 19th century – and then it seems as if the 20th century barely happened at all.

The powers that be built stuff in rural Ireland partly out of guilt – the horrors of the great Famine left some imprint on the official mind. But also they built out of fear. There was a sense that, if Ireland was ever to be settled with the British Empire, the system had to be seen to deliver the benefits of imperial modernity.

Perhaps, once the State was founded, the guilt and the fear vanished, and with them the imperative to build the kind of basic infrastructure that was becoming standard in the rest of Europe.

It was not that the State couldn’t create grand physical projects – the hydroelectric scheme at Ardnacrusha and the electrification of rural Ireland were great public achievements. It was just that small places could be safely allowed to dwindle as their populations emigrated. If people wanted to be modern, they could do it in New York or London.

The hangover from those attitudes has lasted a very long time. The unacceptable became normalised. We put up with a lot of sh*t, sometimes, as in my local case, quite literally.

But the State now needs to be built. Everywhere you look, from housing to public transport to medical centres to basics such as sewage and water, there are stark physical deficits. They give the country its peculiarly unsettling collision of riches and penury, of frantic hyper-capitalist dynamism and slow, sleepy stasis.