THE continuing saga of the sewage treatment plant planned for Mutton Island in Galway Bay may turn into a cause celebre to equal the battle over Mullaghmore in the Burren.
Brendan Howlin's extraordinary and unexpected demarche decreeing that the £23 million plant will be built on Mutton Island despite the environmental anxieties of the European Commission, and at taxpayers' expense if necessary, has concentrated the minds of those who oppose the scheme.
The principal opponent, the Save Galway Bay group, is now scrutinising all legal options with a view to taking the Government and/or Galway Corporation to court, either in Europe or at home, or both.
On a political level, the controversy is fraught with electoral hazards for Michael Higgins in whose constituency Mutton Island is located. His director of elections, John Cunningham, a member of the SGB group, has resigned from the Labour Party, over the manner in which Mr Howlin issued his unease without a word of warning to the local party branch.
The branch unanimously condemned the action at a recent meeting and issued an appeal for, Mr Cunningham to return to the fold.
Galway Corporation lost little time in advertising for tenders for the 1,000 metre causeway that must be built from the Claddagh to the island before the treatment plant can be put in place. If it goes ahead, construction work on the causeway will cause plenty of dust, noise and disruption around the Claddagh for a year or so.
The causeway is central to a barely concealed future agenda for development in and around Galway's dockland. When it is completed, a deep water harbourage could be developed allowing large ships to berth at Galway which they cannot do at the moment.
The vision of some business interests for the future of the docks area involves the development of the harbour environs with a marina, apartment buildings townhouses and hotels. One can see many environmental battles ahead.
SGB still favours the old isolation hospital site at Lough Atalia as the best location for the treatment plant.
Mr Howlin claims this site would necessitate discharging the effluent into shallow water, but SGB has little doubt the EU would come up with the extra £5 million or so that would be needed to extend the discharge pipe further out into deeper water. Not quite as deep, though, as the water in which Michael D. may find himself when the next election rolls around.
THE folk memory of the Great Famine has become restless in recent times and, more than ever, people are allowing it to creep darkly into their consciousness. We're confronting those black days and the ineradicable scars they inflicted on our spirit.
Even children can summon up a connection with that past or find a reminder of it in their midst. For me as a child the Famine took the shape of the old hospital in Ballina. It had been a workhouse where corpses piled up, and was spoken about in an almost fretful way until new buildings replaced it and its origins went out of mind.
But the Famine stays out of no Irish person's mind for long. The new awareness of what it meant and did to us has brought it flooding back in countless ways, stronger and more disturbing than ever.
The sculptor John Behan found his vision of the Famine in the metals of the earth, fashioning a coffin ship out of bronze in which the sails are the skeletal bodies hunger victims hanging on to each other in their last throes.
Some of the children who came to see it in the Kenny Art Gallery in Galway were moved to tears and one old woman wept long and bitterly at the sight. It is among several Famine themes wrought by Behan being exhibited. The exhibition impelled John Quinn of RTE to write this poem:
THE FAMINE SHIP
Three black masts
Adrift on a hopeless horizon;
A pocked and rotten hull
Coffins the wasted remains
Of those that escaped.
The wind keens
Through threadbare bodies -
Useless skeleton sails
That flail and cling
Wildly to each other
And to hope.
I want to
Cling to this tattered human flotsam,
Will on this voyage
Of the doomed,
But I cannot avert my gaze
From three black masts
Adrift on a Golgotha of dreams.