Sir, Frank McDonald (Opinion, February 12th) listed a depressing roll call of rezoning decisions charting the spreading canker of the Dublin City Metropolis over the hills of Wicklow, the plains of Kildare and the market gardens of North County Dublin. These decisions are taken by politicians whose short term, blinkered vision equates rows of semi detached suburbia with the progress of our people.
The potential hazards of such a simplistic approach to the development of towns and cities were flagged as long ago as the early 1960s in the United States. Some of the junkets attended by the self same politicians would have featured speakers detailing the "lethal cocktail" which would gradually evolve from such poorly integrated and planned development.
The voluntary organisations, labouring without funds and salary increases, will ruefully reflect on what might have been if we had taken the time to work together as a community to develop appropriate master plans, policies and strategies, which focused on the quality of life, rather than facilitating windfall property gains, property developers and housebuilders replicating cloned housing units. This is not to suggest that the latter were necessarily venal in their ambitions, but we mistakenly delegated responsibility to our politicians and public servants to ensure that the necessary guidelines, plans and understanding of complex relationships were provided for in the development and planning process.
We failed to realise that we placed too great a burden on their shoulders, when we should have participated in the process. The politicians and public servants acknowledged their overloading by attempting consultation procedures in recent years, but all too often this has been a token gesture. Neither they nor the community are familiar with the true meaning of participation, which is a step beyond one way consultation.
We are a young nation, a people now shedding the insecurity and self conscious shackles of colonisation. We must urgently grasp the planning process by the neck, and work together to develop the essential framework, that it has lacked since its inception in 1963. This framework will involve strictures not only for our politicians and public servants, but also for ourselves. But it must reflect a growing awareness of our responsibility to exercise wise stewardship in the management of our built and natural environment.
Some may feel it is almost too late to start. It is never too late; we must work together to avoid replicating not alone our own mistakes, but those of other societies. Let us also return to the battlefields of our past mistakes, and drawing on the energy, creativity and vision of our talented people, let us develop solutions for the ills we have inflicted on large sections of our population. Future generations will judge us on the quality of our productivity, not the quantity. - Yours, etc.,
Landscape Alliance Ireland, Old Abbey Gardens, Waterfall, Cork.