The recent proposal for a new city in the west of Ireland has created a lot of interest. Not everyone is in favour, or course. Already, the cynics are having a field day, just as they did when Knock Airport was only a gleam in Monsignor Horan's eye.
The idea - apparently backed by politicians of all hues (or at least one of each), by a Galway businessman, the Bishop of Achonry and our beloved President herself - is that out of the bogs of east Mayo should rise a new Atlantis, a city covering 30 square miles, with an initial population of 100,000, and designed for occupation by 250,000 people within 20 years.
It is by any standards a magnificent vision, replete with community centres, "spatial detached housing" (whatever that may be), wide boulevards and avenues, underground parking, churches, shops and other recreational facilities.
However, even at the proposal stage, there are some aspects which seem out of place in the vision of a modern city. First-class housing is obviously important, but the expressed need for a community centre is rather odd, a city being itself a community centre by definition.
As for churches, the experience in Dublin and other Irish cities has surely shown that they are now entirely redundant, while modern cities have long since replaced individual personalised shops with agreeably anonymous malls. However, we can forgive these mildly embarrassing reminders of our peasant background, and look at the bigger, brighter picture. It is encouraging that the Galway businessman, William Thomas, who is among those backing the notion of a new city, received a letter from Mrs McAleese "wishing them luck with the proposal". Using the Freedom of Information Act, I have secured a copy of this letter, which reads as follows:
Dear William,
Of all the amusing proposals I have seen in my term of office so far, yours takes the biscuit. I love the stuff about boulevards on the bogs, and the infrastructured suburbia rising out of the mists of Mayo. I haven't laughed so much for years. The best of luck to you and your colleagues, and I imagine you will need it.
God bless you.
Yours sincerely,
Mary McAleese.
Meanwhile, my colleague John Waters is among those who are not at all keen on the proposal or the proposers. Have these people gone stone raving mad? - he asks.
In support of his stance against the new city, John recalls an idyllic summer's day of long ago, standing in a field in his father's farm in Co Roscommon, and imagining people rushing and bustling along Baggot Street in Dublin, while he was surrounded by silence, apart from the sounds of birds and wind and the odd thud of sledge on fencing post in the distance. He went on to make the point that no place on earth is as lonely as the modern city.
The funny thing is, I remember that very day myself, because there weren't half as many idyllic summer days long ago as we all pretend. Anyway, I was out on my uncle's farm in Bonniconlon, Co Mayo, riding an old jackass at full pelt round the field, when the bad-tempered beast flung me off into a large cow-pat beside a bunch of nettles.
As I crawled away, covered in filth and stings, I could hear all of the following: the mocking bray of the donkey, the cawing of rooks and the squealing of pigs; the head-splitting throb of the threshing machine, the dreary chugging of maybe a dozen elderly Massey-Ferguson tractors, and the agonised whine of perhaps 30 mud-encrusted Honda 50s carrying their young owners and companions to the hurling match. I could hear the roars from the match itself, the splitting of camans on heads or other camans, the screams of encouragement from partisan young women, the roaring of drink-maddened supporters and the bawling of babies.
Also contributing to the rural cacophony on this idyllic summer's day were the disgusting squelching noises of the bog, the senseless mooing of what seemed like a million cows, the background baa-ing of idiotic sheep and the regular backfiring of 20-year-old Ford Anglias (gloriously free of tax certs, insurance discs and exhaust systems), as their rustic owners coaxed them along the road to and from the church, the GAA grounds and the pub.
That day I made a solemn vow to myself: I will get out of here and get some peace in the city if it's the last thing I do. If the new city of the west had materialised that day, I would have been the first to move in.