Madam, - Michael Harding talks of moving to Leitrim, where "the banks of the Shannon had remained still for centuries", and laments the subsequent loss of a simpler Leitrim of cheap housing and rural bliss ("Modern Moment", Irish Times Magazine, September 24th). And, as is usual with bouts of cheap cultural hand-wringing, Mr Harding displays a magnificent lack of self-consciousness regarding the current social changes in that county.
Change is inevitable. It was taking place in Leitrim long before Mr Harding arrived and it will continue after he leaves. As a native of Co Leitrim, born in the late 1970s, I do not remember a time when it was "difficult to find a shop that sold a fresh carrot" in Carrick-on-Shannon, nor would I wish to. I doubt very much that Mr. Harding can either. And his suggestion that such a scenario is an index of better times is frankly baffling.
Does he really think that, as an artist "drawn to that remote spot", he has played no role in the new-found popularity of Leitrim as a place to live? Or does his arrival somehow mark the point after which it is no longer acceptable for Leitrim to change? The arrival in Leitrim of artists and other seekers of a latter-day Celtic Twilight was itself a part of Leitrim's development; to deny this is to renounce these artists' responsibility for what Leitrim has become.
The new Leitrim with its rash of development is, at least in part, a direct response to the fact that more and more people choose to move there. I am not a fan of the dormer houses mushrooming on every hill from Drumshanbo to Dowra, but neither can I honestly say that Leitrim would be better off without them.
Still, as Mr Harding says, he is moving to Mullingar; perhaps denial and rejection of responsibility comes easy. Perhaps, instead of complaining about what Leitrim has become, he should stick around and do something to help shape Leitrim in a positive manner. Many others have, as the Joe Mooney Summer School, the Dock Arts Centre and Leitrim Mobile Cinema (which has hosted film festivals based on the writings of John McGahern and William Trevor) all demonstrate.
Furthermore, Mr Harding's references to the grave of the late John McGahern are not only distasteful but also wrongheaded. No writer questioned our romantic views of rural life more than did McGahern. The Leitrim of The Dark is not a place in which anyone would wish to remain. McGahern's last novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun, with its row of new telephone poles, one "set down in the middle of the wild cherries", displays a stoic acceptance of change. Romantic Leitrim "in the grave"? Like Yeats's Celtic Twilight, it never really existed. - Yours, etc,
AENGUS WOODS, Maujer Street, Brooklyn, New York, USA.