The discussion of Census 2002 suggests that, somehow or another, our present models of development have crept up on us. We repeat the stark facts about the population imbalance in Leinster and Dublin and wonder how things could get so bad, writes John Waters.
It is as though we have fallen prey to some mysterious, malign, developmental infection, and are powerless other than to suffer and observe.
For all the imperfections of public policy in the years before wall-to-wall media debate, the disasters visited on the Irish people were fairly nondescript when compared to what is happening now. In an age when every twitch and twist of public policy is analysed and debated ad nauseam, the disjunction between what we say we want and what happens is greater than ever.
We debate about prosperity, development, progress, in a manner suggesting no end of choices and imaginative possibilities, and then a frightening proportion of the opinionators end up living in Lucan. Sitting in two-hour tailbacks, they have plenty of time to ring into Liveline to berate the horrendous planning decisions which have made nonsense of their lives.
Somewhere, it is rumoured, there is a document entitled the National Spatial Strategy, which defines as never before the project of living as it might take place in the Ireland of the third millennium, as though this were a complicated matter. A six-year-old child could design a spatial strategy for this State, a relatively small piece of territory, with less than four million inhabitants, across which virtually any journey is capable of being made in less than three hours. All that is required is the definition of a few key objectives, underpinned by a handful of policies concerning matters of industry, housing and transportation.
Most people with a reasonable degree of self-awareness will admit that the things that befall them are almost invariably the result of their own thinking. We are thinking even when we think we're not, and often the things we think when we don't think we're thinking are the thoughts that remake our lives. If we look honestly at the demographic configuration of this society, we will have to admit that, for all that it is patently undesirable from virtually any perspective, it is, in a way, the culmination of our collective thinking and the concrete expression of at least some of our desires, the result of what you might call our thoughtless thinking over many years.
For three decades now we have endured the nonsense of the discussion of the alleged urban-rural divide, when in reality we never had until recently anything other than a couple of public squares that might remotely be described as urban. Ireland was until recently a small rural entity, with a handful of moderately-sized towns.
But this model of Ireland was incompatible with modernity, and so it became necessary to talk not just about "urban Ireland" as some separate place but as some new ideal to which we need to move swiftly and without regret. Thus, by virtue of even slight distance from the new urban thoroughfares, a place would be defined not merely as remote but also as backward, sub-modern and ideologically tainted. This thinking created the nightmare which now confronts us.
Today, there is indeed a place answering to the name of Urban Ireland, and immediately the still-healthy part of our collective brain describes it, precisely, as an " urban sprawl".
ANY time in the past two decades, the drift to the east could have been averted or reversed by a little investment in railways and roads, a little affirmative action in industrial policy giving preference to the supposedly peripheral regions. Instead, we gave centre-stage to the ideologues who had, in truth, come to hate everything about Ireland as it was, and didn't really care if they made things worse so long as they made things change.
Whenever arguments were advanced about the decline of the west or the neglect of the Border counties, the ideologues would jump in with their accusations about chauvinistic localism and special pleading and remind us that there must be no return to discredited notions of an "ideal Ireland".
They would produce flawless statistics to show that, on a per-capita basis, it was Dublin that was being short-changed by industrial strategy. Their arguments seemed as irrefutable then as they appear tragic now. What we have arrived at is the coherent expression of the per-capita strategy of development, by which you invest where the population is and dismiss the objections of the excluded as the spleen of the irrelevant.
This thoughtless thinking continues. In recent years, we have observed the emergence of a new parliamentary phenomenon in the form of the independent TD, elected invariably by a peripheral constituency on what appears to be a local or even single-issue platform. The modernising tendency has decried this development, accusing such electorates of naked self-interest, throwing their hands up in horror at the prospect that any government might take on board the concerns such representatives have been elected to articulate.
But perhaps it is time to begin perceiving such movements not just as the expression of local self-interest, but as also the subliminal voice of our collective common sense, which recognises that the emaciation of Leitrim and the engorgement of Lucan are a single problem with a simple solution.