Of course the residents of Ringaskiddy are appalled at the prospect of having an incinerator on their doorstep; and it's only human for everyone else, once they're sure no incinerator is going to be built on their doorstep, to intone wisely that we've got to have incinerators somewhere, you know.
And so we have. We can't keep on exporting pollution, as we do, both as waste and through the industrial products we import: the iron in our cars has to be smelted somewhere, and foreigners are living downwind of oil refineries for us to have the petrol we use. So we must grow up. Yet equally, we must have laws that reflect the moral and financial reality of the consequences of such maturity.
Is that possible, the way this country is run? The Ringaskiddy incinerator will make huge profits for its owners. Why, then, are the local residents not compensated out of those profits for damage to the value of their properties? Why does An Bord Pleanála not, as a matter of principle, order compensation for those who will suffer financially because of the projects it authorises, and which will make large profits for people far away?
Take the ruling closest to my heart, and my home, concerning the Readymix sand and gravel open-cast mine outside Ballymore Eustace. This will extend over 120 acres, will generate 2,000 lorry movements a week, lasting roughly 12 hours a day, six days a week. It could surely be argued that the constitutional property rights of the owners of the 60 houses on the plant-perimeter - and mine is not one of them - are being violated, and that accordingly they should be compensated by Readymix.
Well, naturally, Readymix would oppose such an action with batteries of SCs; and aided by its vast war-chest, it could financially wear down the local residents. But it shouldn't have to come down to minnows having to battle with a mighty company, in which both AIB and Bank of Ireland have substantial holdings. It should be a matter of law, as it is in mainland Europe, where communities adversely affected by strategically necessary commercial projects are compensated by the companies which profit thereby.
But here in Ireland, we order these things differently. We have no such laws, and the reason is not far to find. For who gives more visibly and lavishly to our political parties: the large companies which make vast profits out of State decisions, often at the price of small and inchoate communities that they pick off, one by one; or those communities themselves?
The fundamental and grotesque injustice of the mighty triumphing over the weak in its rulings is apparently so unendurable that An Bord Pleanála simply denies reality. The Readymix plant, it declared, will have no impact on any local property at all - a judgment, one might think, available only to a fool or a knave.
But maybe we have an administrative class composed neither of knaves nor fools, but of knools, who answer to priorities known only unto themselves. Maybe the existence of this caste, clandestine about its councils, inscrutable about its purposes, omnipotent in its sovereignty, explains so much of what is mysterious about Irish life.
The M50-Donaghmede link road is surely knoolocracy's masterpiece. It is a five-lane road. One lane on each side is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week bus corridor: the bus monopoly endures, even in the darkest watches of the night, when no buses run. But even on a busy Sunday afternoon, I saw not a single bus going in either direction. And of the other three lanes, the central one is closed to traffic by hatching.
So, the State paid for an expensive, wide road, laying hard-core for five lanes, and creating a surface for five lanes. But only two are available for lorries and cars; two are available for virtually non-existent buses; and a fifth - the hatched lane - is closed to all traffic.
Or so I assume. But maybe I am being naïve. Maybe knools have a monopoly over the hatched lanes, along which they glide in their hatchmobiles with knoolish hauteur to the meetings where they decide on the conduct of public life in Ireland.
Clearly, knools constructed the M50 linking Dun Laoghaire with Malahide, but without erecting signs in either sets of suburbs telling drivers how to find the circular motorway: or if they did, they provided signs only up until one reaches a vital junction, where they erected no signs at all. Maybe little knoolish CCTVs relay the resultant chaos back to knool HQ, where knools roll around on the floor in hysteria, like the little Martians in the old Smash advertisements.
It was knoolery at its most triumphantly knoolish to have erected signs into the M50 directing motorists either "north" or "south" without saying what destinations lie in either direction. Knools, of course, either know the answer, or don't care - for Ireland is a knool's paradise, where knools rule, and no knool is ever fired or made answerable to the taxpayer.
Knoolery is not confined to doing things badly or incomprehensibly; often enough, it also involves not doing anything at all. Hence the N81 from Blessington to Brittas, unmarked for much its length, is a sort of private highway for the sand and gravel merchants of Wicklow, whose overladen lorries trundle backwards and forwards spilling their loads, regardless of all law, all safety, all legal or moral obligation to others.
And no one in authority stops them, and most bafflingly, almost no one complains.
Welcome to Tír-na-knool.