Sir, - Sometimes the simplest questions are the most difficult ones to ask or to answer. Why, for instance, in the past 10 years has housing development been undertaken in Ireland as if we were a country as dense as Japan rather than a depopulated island on the edge of Europe? The process involved seems to be roughly as follows: buy a field, transfer its scaled dimensions onto a computer screen, fill the screen with as many houses as possible positioned at every conceivable angle to one another. Disregard green space. Begin building from the model. Buy the adjoining fields and continue ad infinitum. As a result our towns and cities are growing bereft of amenity, without any real sense of public facility.
Having witnessed at first hand the impact Thatcherite policies had on ordinary people in Britain, I find what is happening in Ireland today doubly depressing. If anything, rampant individualism is more unchecked here than it was in 1980s Britain. There, in even the darkest times, commentators such as the late David Widgery and Dennis Potter, Steve Bell, Sue Townsend, Alan Bennett and Ken Loach vigorously challenged official versions of well being. But here in Ireland what passes for critical commentary has faded into mealymouthedness, a kind of verbally involved and contorted backslapping.
Occasionally from the corners of our livingrooms we get the real smell of proceedings from Dail Eireann. The ambience is generally one of well lunched torpor as some suit yawns a prepared statement. There is little hope that anywhere among those helium headed ranks a penny might drop and, in vain and bloated middleage, some individual might remember what he/she knew instinctively in youth, that, if faced down with courage, even the most rapacious tiger might turn out to be made of paper after all.
We are waiting for a politician to declare that the reticent decency of the vast majority of Irish people does not deserve to be exploited by a greedy minority as it is being exploited today. People deserve a real boom rather than a paper one.
In a real boom, hospitals would become clean and relatively comfortable, teachers would have time off from fundraising to teach, library services would be expanded rather than cut back and all so called developers would be forced by legislation to provide corresponding green space whenever they build houses. And houses themselves might even have gardens again. - Yours, etc.,
Bearna,
Co. Galway.