On the face of it, the Government proposal to fast-track major projects to overcome obstructions in the planning process makes every sense: who is unaware of the ludicrous delays in projects which are vital to the national interest? asks Kevin Myers
Why should the country suffer because this interest group or that interest group has some bees in its eccentric bonnet over things close to its heart alone? But on the other hand, is there any project whose backers will not defend it as being in the national interest?
Readymix, for example, could certainly defend its proposed sand and gravel extraction project outside Ballymore Eustace as being in the national interest. We need sand; we need gravel. What more needs to be said about it? Well, this actually: the Readymix project will probably be an unmitigated financial catastrophe for a large numbers of householders in the area. Many homes have now been made virtually unsellable because of Readymix's imminent arrival next door. (To declare my own interest: I live about two miles from this site, so my house is - happily - not directly affected).
The Readymix project involves the demolition of a 120-acre hill at Dowdenstown just outside Ballymore, the only place in Kildare to have an assured village status. There are two aspects to Readymix's operation. One is the actual extraction. This will essentially involve open-cast mining using huge metal conveyer belts to remove the hill and to replace it, in time, with a vast crater. The other is the construction of a batching plant for the manufacture of sand-gravel products. Together, they spell a disaster for the 60 families who live immediately next to the site, who of course get no compensation for what is being done to their lives, to the value of the homes, and to their environment.
Moreover, the Readymix plant will generate at least 1,700 lorry movements a week. The roads around Ballymore are all tiny, and are quite incapable of taking such traffic. An Bord Pleanála has ruled that Readymix must widen part of the road leading into Naas: how delightful for the natives whose land will be compulsorily purchased, their hedgerows grubbed up, their trees felled, so they can enjoy the privilege of hearing hundreds of lorries a day roaring past their homes, and all for the benefit of Readymix.
All the junctions into Naas are already overcrowded as it is; adding hundreds of slow-moving lorries to them will make them simply impossible. So lorry drivers will inevitably seek shortcuts into Dublin; one of them will probably be to roar through the sleepy village of Ballymore Eustace for the N81 to Dublin. Henceforth, Ballymorelike Mondello, for though the planning permission specifically excludes certain lorries from entering Ballymore, how will that restriction be binding on individual lorry drivers, and who will enforce it?
The Readymix project is set to last 10 years: an entire childhood being spent next to the demolition of a hill, hearing huge lorries arriving, being loaded up and driven off, probably starting from 6 a.m., six days a week. At the end of those 10 years of noise and atmospheric pollution, the developer, Readymix, will have been expected to undertake full restoration of the site. But how can you restore a hill? The tragic history of Kildare is that some huge holes in the ground resulting from sand and gravel extraction have been turned into municipal dumps for Dublin.
How could Kildare County Council and An Bord Pleanála have assented to such a vast project in an area without any infrastructure, and conferring very little local gain? Does Readymix really believe that because it can buy a large field it has the moral and social right to inflict such grievous hurt on the blameless people who live round that field? That it is not its intention to do hurt is irrelevant. The biggest investment these local people have made in their entire lives - their homes - is being grossly devalued, while the value of Readymix is by the same process being enhanced.
And what is the ethical justification for Readymix management making such ruthless decisions about strangers' lives? Imagine the boot being on the other foot: how would John McNerney, the managing director of Readymix, and Martin Rafferty, the company chairman, like it if people (murmuring "national interest") arrived outside their homes and did to them what they are doing to others? And will they visit this part of Kildare in a couple of years' time, to contemplate the ravaged landscape, the devalued homes, and the combination of huge lorry jams or lorries hurtling down tiny country lanes and through Ballymore, and will they feel their hearts surge with authorial pride? Yes, by God, we did all that.
The planning process has inflicted a grotesque and scandalous injustice on the weak and the powerless without any recompense. Utterly blameless families who have been living in a rural idyll are about to be visited by the scourge of open-cast mining, with its metal conveyer-belts, its din, its dust and its endless lorry movements; and they will receive not a penny in return. But the owners of Readymix - including RMC, a British company (63 per cent shareholding), the Bank of Ireland (9 per cent) and AIB (4.4 per cent) - will make tens of millions of euro.
So yes, it sounds wonderful that projects of "national interest" can be hurried through. But the abysmal history of this State suggests that the powerful will always link what is in their personal interest to the national interest.
And to judge by Readymix's proposed rape of an entire hill in Kildare, at the expense of the community living there, our supine, craven public bodies can be relied on to agree with them.