Sir, - In the context of the car scrappage issue, a Blackrock, Co Dublin correspondent (December 11th) baldly states: "There are too many cars on Irish roads".
Indeed. Well, I don't find this to be the case at all. From Killala to Ballina is a distance of eight miles, and I can travel that road and see maybe half-a-dozen cars on the journey. At some times of day, this figure can be reduced to nill And apart from the great view of Nephin, highlighted by unofficial travellers' encampments, unlandscaped chemical factory and unbelievable town dump, there is nothing unusual about this road.
At this time of year I can travel from here to Belmullet, some forty miles, and see maybe a dozen cars. I can travel thirty miles to Castlebar in considerable comfort, with many a mile of road to myself. I warrant that similar distances and related numbers of cars can be repeated all over the area west of the Shannon.
However strange this may appear to philosophising commuters stuck on the Blackrock bypass, it's a fact that in this part of the world we too generally consider the roads we travel on to be "Irish". And we don't feel that there are too many cars on Irish roads. Round here, there are far too few. And there are too few cars on our Irish roads because there are too few Irish people here, and there are too few Irish people here because of the development policies of the Government (the results of these policies highlighted in a report only recently).
The point is that the problem of Dublin traffic congestion is essentially the same problem as the de-population of the West of Ireland. Both aspects of this one problem arise from the same cause unbalanced development, caused by lack of vision and leadership. - Yours, etc.,
Gore Street, Killala, Co Mayo.