Sir, - Anyone who is not mentally incapacitated should be amazed in contrasting the recent flooding of homesteads and arable land in several regions with the current water shortages necessitating the periodic cuts in supplies in counties Dublin, north Wicklow and Kildare.
It illustrates the purblind stupidity of those who choose to govern us in failing to halt the suburban sprawl - nay, in treating it as an incurable law of nature. In Greystones, Co Wicklow, which has the most rapidly expanding population in the EU, this sprawl of housing and supermarkets has occurred without the necessary additional water supply, sewage disposal and DART transport being put down in advance. Now refuse collection is being drastically restricted with proportionally higher costs to householders, notably pensioners.
The sprawl should never have taken place. In the Greystones area the undersigned carried out the last rearguard action against it in 1969 in a successful campaign preventing developers converting the Greystones park into a major shopping centre.
Eric Hobsbawn highlighted the dilemma in On History, one of his many major works: "So far in the 20th century all countries I know have failed to solve by deliberate planning a problem which for many centuries appeared to offer no great difficulty for humanity, namely how to construct a working city which should also be a human community. This should give us pause."
In the early days of Official Sinn Fein (before it prolapsed into suspension-of-disbelief scenarios masquerading as valid politics, which culminated as the Workers' and Democratic Left parties) I had convinced it of the need to establish new cities (like the then "City State" of Cork). The Government then, dimly comprehending that things were off keel, advanced the specious Buchanan plan as an alternative panacea for such radical decentralisation. This was intended to organically link city and country, industry and agriculture. Instead we have the begging-bowl economy of the Celtic Tiger, unable to dismount, with one of the last native enterprises (sic), NET, finally going down the drain, awash with debt, and our social bonds as a nation all but destroyed as we settle for the pig-swill of the cash-nexus. - Yours, etc., Derry Kelleher,
Hillside Road, Greystones, Co Wicklow.