Sir, - I suspect that as a female I hold little chance of contributing to your prestigious letters page in the matter of a town planning or development, but I can imagine the scenario your correspondents David McCabe (December 21st) and Bernard Tighe (January 12th) aspire to for Sandymount Strand.
All those stupid birds would be seen no longer. On Sundays and feast days we would have the return of the donkey boys providing rides for fine, hefty, screeching Irish colleens, and sure if the donkeys are on the slow side then they can use the stick with the tin-tack at its tip. This used to be a fine old tradition in Sandymount, together with ice-cream sellers of cones full of nutritious biological organisms.
On the new park on these festival days we will make our way between the rows and rows of metal boxes called cars and sympathise as harassed mamas look around for a place to hide those squelching nappies. We will make Sundays on Dun Laoghaire Pier look deserted and abandoned, and you may be quite sure that this project will have the full support of the Sandymount and Merrion Residents' Association, an august body whose officers are selected for their environmental concerns.
The Nutley, the Elm Park and the Muckross rivers will be diverted to Tallaght and that dirty marsh at Booterstown will dry up and provide a superb car park for all those visitors.
Furthermore, why should the residents of the new houses off Sean Moore Road mind if the traffic roaring past their houses trebles?
I am, dear sir, as well able to remember the kind of Brighton Rock and Blackpool Pier ambience that failed in Sandymount and will fail again if it is tried. Land greed is the curse of the Irish as a race, and even when they believe that they are truly urbanised they can never get away from it as a way of thinking. - Your, etc., Catherine Cavendish,
Prospect Terrace, Sandymount, Dublin 4.