YEATS’S DREAM OF SLIGO HAD MORE GOING FOR IT
ACYNIC can only re-imagine our defining idyllic vision for the countryside, envisaged by a city-dweller. The Lake Isle Of Inisfree was set in Sligo too. Here it is afresh, planned for the shiny new future of which Yeats could never have dreamed: I shall arise and go now, to Sligo I.T. And a large capital plan unveil there Made of claims of what’ll be Nine big deals shall I have there A prize for the home TD; And live with Leo in the ‘Be Proud’ glade. I’ll have infrastructure piecemeal For each piece comes dropping slow Dropped by the blasted Troika When we last planned a great Metro... (And so on, and so forth)
Yeats was trapped in London in his verse, tramping the pavements grey, and dreaming of lake water lapping on the shore. As the red buses fumed by, he heard that murmured moisture in his deep heart’s core. But the core of Project Ireland 2040, by contrast, is a poetic vision of tarmac and transport everywhere, brought to every corner of Ireland. So we’ll pave paradise – and put up a park and ride.
And if we don’t get to you for a while, ah shure just build yourself your one-off house along a ribbon of road (we’ll square away the local authority) and wait till the high-viz legion turns up. Which they will, as sure as eggs is eggs. Just vote for us to make doubly, triply sure.
Gnarled old hacks have seen it all before, from Transport 2021 to the National Spatial Strategy, the drive for Decentralisation and the Dynamic Blueprint Towards an Eighth Eurovision Win. None of these, obviously, have ever come about. But the last-named at least had the virtue of not being committed to expensive glossy paper and video, unlike the rest.
Your politicians are deeply offended by those who look askance at their utopian clouds. Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy snapped at Sean O’Rourke on national radio yesterday that he was sensing some negativity. But this generation of idealists did indeed come down with the last shower – many elected for the first time after Brian Cowen’s shower was thrown out in 2011.
They are indeed innocent of past sins, but probably condemned to repeat them. Because Irish politics rewards cynicism, the multi-seat PR voting system making it brutally pragmatic, with local considerations forever transcending the national.
LOOK how rural and backbench TDs kicking up caused this plan to be changed before it was even born into the Knocknarea Arena yesterday, where the basketball furniture was folded back and hidden in velvet curtains. So with this report – the more the razzmatazz the greater must be the suspicion. And the PR was at blinding warp speed yesterday.
The Begrudger’s Guide To Irish Politics, a book published in 1980, still holds true. On its first page it quoted one yokel enthusing to another as the Free State was born: ‘We’ll have our own gentry now, Pat!”
Pat spat. Then the wizened one replied to his friend: ‘We will in our a*** have our own gentry.’
No, nor airport rail link neither.