The greenway tracing the old Midlands Railway Line passes through my hometown Moate. This means that walking it for me involves revisiting the de facto playground of my childhood, when we used to cross from the fields onto a stone bridge and climb down onto the tracks, so we could put our ears to the sleepers and imagine we heard a train coming, something someone must have seen on TV. MacGyver, probably. In those days it was rare for an actual train to use that line, beyond the odd freight one, and one day it was decommissioned altogether. Almost three decades were to pass before it became the greenway it is today.
This time of year, it’s all industrious birdsong and teeming hedgerow there – sharp green flecked with the yellow-white-purple of wildflower – even as you pass through the town. It’s only if you’re looking at the right moment that you’ll notice through all that foliage a grim relic of the Celtic Tiger: one string of houses, never completed. The last row of a now otherwise thriving estate, its windows are either boarded up or smashed, its back doorways covered by sullen sheets of metal, its would-be gardens long consumed by nettles, meadow-grass and ivy, where there should be clotheslines, flower beds, maybe a trampoline.
Of course, it wasn’t just ghost estates that blighted the recessionary landscape. We also had cropping up everywhere zombie hotels, apartment blocks and business parks, often with scant heed paid to wider social needs or minimum standards. Then there was all those over-sized, one-off houses, as much status symbols as homes – “jutty houses” the character Nancy calls them in Crookedwood, my new novel set during the Celtic Tiger. As a 2010 paper from Maynooth University put it, “A new spectre is haunting Ireland. The spectre of development run amok.”
Usually, when Celtic Tiger blame is being laid, a key target is our modern-day gombeen man, the developer. But in my experience people (and that includes developers) generally believe what they’re doing is the right thing, whether they’re right or wrong being another matter. In Crookedwood, Neil Hart, pub owner turned developer, is eager to turn his scrap of inherited land by the motorway into a housing and retail development. He sincerely feels his ambitious plans will only benefit the town, through new employment and business, a view shared by the town’s local councillor.
The fact that Neil is also set to benefit financially, and the councillor in terms of votes, is something they can validly claim, to themselves as well as to others, to be nothing more than fortunate side-effects. This is not to say that Neil’s motives are completely pure. The human heart is a complex thing, and people also see what they want to, other reasons for behaviour lurking just out of reach. In Neil’s case, greed is there alright, both for wealth and greater social status, but it’s not something he sees when he looks in the mirror.
Greed, in any case, can’t damage a landscape via poorly-conceived, profit-motivated developments, as much as it might want to. Only enabled greed can do that. The banking system, with its profligate lending, was clearly complicit. But as the Maynooth paper points out, the banks could have lent all the money they wanted and none of this would have happened if our perfectly good planning guidelines had been enforced. The question remains as to why no effective effort was made to enforce them, their whole point of existence being to ensure such things never happened. Why, instead of providing the checks and balances we so badly needed, did our planning regime instead fall in line with that insatiable drive for development?
Someone once said that greed is a kind of fear. If we consider the Celtic Tiger in the context of this country’s history of poverty and colonisation, this has some resonance, I think. As the geographer Kevin Whelan noted, “Communities lose their landscape when they value them in exclusively monetary terms, when they don’t love them enough”. We needed a planning regime that loved our landscape and us, for that matter, more than we could manage ourselves. In this it failed us. Which is of course another way of saying that we failed us.
And we continue to fail us, the current housing crisis deepening even as the wounds of the last one have either not yet fully healed or have settled into ugly scar tissue. According to Rory Hearne, this one is fuelled by a government policy that deliberately seeks to deliver “housing as an investment asset, not a home”. In other words, we still haven’t learned how to value what’s most important in non-monetary terms; a society rather than just an economy. Maybe we still haven’t learned how to protect ourselves from our own worst tendencies.
Yet it’s not like we’re incapable of getting things right. In Crookedwood, it’s the new motorway that makes it possible for its protagonist Sarah Flynn to follow, however tentatively, her dream of a new future. This system that cuts through the countryside, making everywhere closer and easier to access with relatively little disruption to the landscape, is surely a gift of the Celtic Tiger. And then of course there’s our transformation of the old rail network into greenways – an initiative that’s about nothing if not about appreciating our landscape and communities. After all those years of lying unseen and unused, people can now take in its crazy birdsong and indefatigable hedgerow and wildflower, its abundance of sloes and blackberries later in the year, how here and there the land on either side plunges vertiginously, so the fields are suddenly a sheer drop down, or how a couple of miles outside Moate, lie the ruins of what must once have been a fine farmhouse, its windows now gaping cavities, its roof half gone, half sagging, sleet-grey tiles, a lovely, skilled stonework visible in the sections of wall that have not disappeared beneath a shaggy layer of ivy.
Crookedwood by Liza Costello is published in trade paperback by Hachette Ireland,£13.99
