While it is nice to get to Sligo from Dalkey in three hours, the trip is monotonous on the eye and wearing on the soul, writes John Waters
WE OWE Moate an apology. For years, the relationship of many of us to that township has been defined by resentment, as we sat seething in our cars wondering if Moate would ever end. Now, in a sense, Moate has ended. I met a man last week just back from the opening of the new N6 motorway section between Kilbeggan and Athlone, which bypasses Moate, removing it from most of our lives. "That was my last time in Moate," he declared.
At the sod-turning two years ago, the then minister for transport Martin Cullen explained: "The N6 Kilbeggan to Athlone road project forms part of the East/West Strategic Road Corridor. It is a further development in delivering Transport 21 that connects the regions and promotes prosperity in communities. It will provide a bypass for Kilbeggan, Moate and Horseleap, giving these towns back to their people. At the moment this section of the N6 has traffic volumes in the region of 13,000 every day, of which 1,500 are HGVs, while Moate can experience three-mile tailbacks on Friday evenings. In addition, it will reduce journey times by up to 30 minutes at peak times."
I especially admire the way the minister, in his aside about giving towns back to their people, sought to avoid hurting Moate's feelings. With due respect to Horseleap and Kilbeggan, I do not think they are quite in the same category of national scapegoat as Moate.
They might be said to have suffered in being seen by passers-through as an impediment to westerly progress; but, being smaller, which is to say shorter, they did not attract anything like the same level of opprobrium.
Moate has suffered a prolonged and grievous defamation, a deep hurt to its self-confidence, and an extended tailback of a slur upon its character. Twenty years ago, hardly an episode of the cult television programme Nighthawks went by without someone saying something snide about Moate. All because Moate simply stood its ground, refused to get out of the way, but politely tolerated the invading lines of West-fetishists passing daily by its doors.
If we are to deal with what psychoanalysts call the "issues" arising from the Tiger years, a good way of beginning might be to ruminate on what has happened with Moate and how it mirrors what has happened to us all.
Fifteen years ago, before all this progress stuff got under way, I wrote here about our changing attitude to roads and how they were creating a defining metaphor for our attitude to space and time. Even then the new roads were already connecting, and dividing the economically significant regions of the east from the more leisurely regions of the west, and reducing the midlands to an obstacle course in between.
At the time I cited Milan Kundera's observation in his novel Immortality that what we think of as roads actually fall into two categories: roads and routes. "A route differs from a road," he wrote, "not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects." A route represents "the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time".
A road, though, "is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has a meaning in itself and invites us to stop".
But roads and routes, he stressed, are "two different conceptions of beauty". There is nothing wrong with wanting to get from A to B in the shortest time. But sometimes this objective loses sight of its purpose in an obsessive sense of space as a mere obstacle between two modes of living. And we do the same with time, wishing the week away to get to the weekend and missing the weekend because of worrying about next week.
It is nice, I admit, to be able to get from Dalkey to Sligo in three hours, but this is at the cost of a journey that is monotonous on the eye and wearing on the soul. Having for years delighted in the improvements to our national road system, I have recently found myself turning off and taking roads that, as a result of these improvements, have been wiped off the map.
Going west nowadays, for example, I might occasionally turn off the Mullingar bypass, skirt around the suburbs and head towards Ballymahon. To do so is like taking a time machine, for you soon find yourself driving through countryside unchanged since the 1970s.
Or, instead of following the M1 all the way home, I go into Kinnegad and take the old road to Dublin via Enfield, Kilcock and Leixlip, all beautiful towns. This changes entirely the meaning of the journey and gives me, literally, pause for thought, not least thought about whether, whenever I go someplace in Ireland, I really have to be home within three hours.
Next time I go west I plan to pull over into Moate and make amends over a cup of tea.