Madam, - Myles na Gopaleen must be chuckling in his grave. Brian Ó Daimhín (August 16th) attempted to justify modern ribbon development as a continuation of Gaelic iron-age settlement patterns. He even went on to defend the "traditional septic tank". It doesn't take long for something to become "traditional" (and hence beyond criticism) in rural Ireland.
This kind of thing would be funny if it were not part of a national fantasy that has caused great damage to this country. This fantasy is that the Irish are somehow the most rural people of the Western world. They alone passed into modern times without being urbanised and proletarianised. This is, of course, simply wrong.
Over the past two centuries the Irish drifted off the land just like everyone else, but instead of ending up in Irish cities they mostly ended up in British and American cities. Consequently Ireland retained a rural majority into the late 20th century. This was not a choice but the result of economic failure. It was tragic and shameful, rather than a cause for boasting as people like Brian Ó Daimhín (and Tom Parlon and Marian Harkin ) seem to think.
Up until the recent local elections politicians assumed that any anti-urban policy would be an automatic vote-getter, so pervasive has been this Celtic Twilight ideology. For the urban majority, the madcap decentralisation scheme was the last straw.
I hope this majority will go on to demand that even the most cynical politicians realise their priority is to improve urban life rather than to pander to self-serving special pleading from the diminishing numbers of rural dwellers. - Yours, etc.,
TIM O'HALLORAN, Ferndale Road, Dublin 11.