A chara, – I hear alarm bells ringing this Christmas. While generous budgets seem endlessly available for new, glossy, Dublin-based projects such as an outdoor swimming pool close to the Liffey, instead of the white-water rafting idea, handpicking of weeds growing between the roads and footpaths, now that “green” weeding techniques are preferred to herbicides, a library which cost €36.6 million, experimental cycle lanes and pedestrian zones, not much is heard of decentralisation.
Naturally, the denser the population in cities, the more funding will be available for glossy city projects.
Meanwhile the entire population of the rest of Ireland has been forced into the position of activists, forced into protesting at the lack of planning permission to sustain the population in Gaeltacht and country areas, clamouring for a fair deal while their houses crumble due to faulty building materials, dependant on their cars to go anywhere due to lack of footpaths and street lighting in villages, invaded in summer time and left in semi-solitude in non-holiday season with inadequate public transport and roads and bridges needing upgrading, plagued with wind turbines and masts erected close to their homes, agitating for safer hospitals although few medical personnel are attracted to living in the under-funded provinces, fighting for status for their third-level colleges while university status is seen to be available more readily in the capital.
Ding-dong merrily on high, time to decentralise! – Is mise,
PAULINE UÍ ARGÁIN,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.