It's easy to miss Johnstown. Just off the Naas dual carriageway, its single street sums up the Irish for village, sraidbhaile, perfectly. Johnstown almost belongs to caricature, with its ornate and tiny Victorian cottages, their little window boxes, flowering climbers and tiny front gardens, the old stone walls and the venerable broadleaf trees. Visitors know the village for two reasons. One is the award-winning garden centre, and the other is the picturesque Johnstown Inn.
The village is now on the point of ruination, thanks to the corporate endeavours of Kildare County Council and An Bord Pleanala. The other day, JCBs uprooted some of Johnstown's lovely beeches and levelled an ancient wall which had previously been protected by a preservation order. Liffey Homes, against the strenuous objections of the local people, and now to their infinite distress, have begun to build the first of 80 homes in an estate in the very centre of the village.
And that is merely the first instalment of the rape of Johnstown. Planning permission has been granted for 400 new houses and for a hotel. Johnstown will soon become a suburb of Naas, which is itself growing almost beyond control, and beyond the ability of the local infrastructure to cope with. A few miles away, as I have written before, planning permission is being sought for over 500 houses in Ballymore Eustace on land which Kildare councillors have already voted to rezone, thereby trebling the population of the village. And a local businessman, with strong Fianna Fail connections, plans further "development" - that wretched word being our current euphemism for the the forcible superimposition of soulless dormitory-suburbs upon the sleepy, unorganised and politically dispensable little village communities of Meath, Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin.
Fighting back
Fortunately, the people of Ballymore are fighting back: I wish them well, not merely because I love their village but also because the principle on which they are fighting - the right of communities to decide the rate at which they will be changed - is a vital one. For no-one publicly disputes the need for housing; the problem lies in the distance between declaration and deed. For no-one publicly announces that the need will be met out of the ruination of the villages of Leinster either, though that is precisely what has been happening.
A policy of covert, piecemeal ruination, which brings enormous profits to a few and devastation to ancient but largely unwitting communities, has been adopted. The people who wake up and find that the places they have loved all their lives are to be changed beyond recognition - and almost overnight - seldom have powerful connections; seldom understand the implications of that terrible word "rezoning"; seldom know how to fight back; seldom have the courage to organise against their adversaries.
Planning process
In one sense it is not a matter of "corruption". It is a matter of that other c-word: credibility. For who actually believes any more in the planning process? Who actually believes in the honesty of local councillors and planning committees? Who will stand up and declare that our planning committees are incorruptible? Who actually believes that builders do not bribe the right councillors to get the right decisions? We have, through inertia, through a political culture of back-door deals and knowing winks, permitted the planning process to become the cause of cynical defeatism and abject demoralisation.
Builders get their way, especially under a Fianna Fail administration: that is the widespread perception. Who actually believes that the frenzy of construction and development across the country is governed by honesty and supervised by irreproachable councillors, or that it abides by a modicum of law? Rightly or wrongly, we assume corruption. One friend of mine who wants to redevelop agricultural land in Leinster - not Kildare - was approached by an influential person who told him that rezoning might be possible if he paid £25,000 each to four county councillors who would then push for rezoning in the planning committee; but the money would be not be returnable in the event of their failure.
Future of landscape
Is the story true? I don't know. I know that everyone who hears this story believes it implicitly. Why not? For in the absence of simple and comprehensible dishonesty, the motives for which make abundant sense, we can only conclude our future and the future of the Irish landscape, our countryside and our villages, is in the hands of incompetent fools. That is far more frightening than being manipulated by clever rogues, who at least should be clever enough to know how far they can go, and that they can only fool the people for some of the time. No such solace is available when your destiny is decided by idiots.
No-one suggests the paid officials of county councils are corrupt; by and large they are honest men and women who find themselves implementing the improvisations of the gombeen, the greedy, the gormless. So are we well served by our county councils? Might we not be better off if they were dissolved, the councillors sent packing, and instead we had honest county managers working under central government? The fate of Johnstown is a scandal; left in the hands of elected councils, it is the future.