Peripheral Vision

We have taken a great leap forward in terms of our telecommunications infrastructure. Following a deal between the Government and the giant US company Global Crossing, we are going to be connected to an enormous undersea fibre-optic cable. In terms of getting in touch with people and business at reasonable cost and a decent pace, we will then be on a par with the US and the major EU states. After that there will be no stopping us, or shutting us up. We will talk and be talked to at top speed for half-nothing until the cows come home, and long after.

Fibre-optics. Some of us remember when fibre had to do with morals, and optics were a new invention to measure your whiskey.

Yes, but those days are gone. "Telecommunications are to e-commerce as grass is to agriculture. The more grass you have, the more business you generate." So says Mr Brendan Tuohy, assistant secretary at the Department of Public Enterprise.

This might indicate some expertise in e-commerce but shows a very poor grasp of agriculture. It is a long time since grass was a serious money-maker. But no one has thought very hard about what this new development will really mean. Because of the vast size of the project, and the way everyone is mesmerised by terms like "e-commerce" and "fibre-optics", the project has been greeted everywhere with blind enthusiasm. The media, with their thinly vested interests, have provided only the most superficial analysis, and are content simply to hail the development as a great advance.

But in the first place, plugging in to Global Crossing's fibre-optic cable is going to cost money, and a sum of £60 million seems a bit much to fork out for what must be a fairly straightforward job. After all, a length of co-axial cable with a screw-on connector will set you back only about £4.50p at Atlantic Homecare. Of course the fellow who has to don a snorkel and fins and dive into the sea at Land's End, Cornwall, to plug the thing in, will have to be paid a few bob too, but still, it's a pricey investment.

Mary O'Rourke obviously thinks it's well worth it. Our Public Enterprise Minister, already drunk with power after the Telecom launch, now reveals herself in a state of advanced electronic megalomania. The announcement of the deal is, she says, "the culmination of the vision outlined at all those seminars, interviews and Dail speeches over the past two years. Soon every man, woman and child in Ireland can avail of high-speed Internet access, and peripherality will no longer be an issue."

On the contrary, it may well be a bigger issue than ever, once it dawns on people how awful it is to dwell in the centre of things. Our mission therefore must be to promote a peripheral Ireland. There are many among us who have absolutely no desire to be at the hub of the universe, electronic or otherwise. We want to live and love, work and play, laugh or cry on the edge, the periphery, the border. We are used to being on the sidelines, and are happy there. We want to observe from a distance, to sit on the fence and feel free to lob our comments - derisive or approving, cajoling or combative - to the circus within. We are happy to gawk and giggle at the eager players, but wish to stay out of the ring at all costs. In the vast theatre of life, we are contented bit players, most of us delighted with non-speaking roles and damned if we ever want to step centre stage.

And we are not going to be dragged in by Mary O'Rourke or anyone else.

After all, where would the centre be without us peripherals? It would have no definition. It would not exist, even as a concept.

We are not joiners, but adjoiners. We are littoral, frontiers-people, out-linear and circumferential. We are on the rim, the margin, the fringe, the hem, the wayside, far out on the widening gyre, in quiet backwaters. Guarding our privacy, we shun spotlight and scrum and the entire chaotic concentric crush. We are the skirting to the room of life.

Eccentricity is our norm. We in the peripheral movement are borderline cases in the best sense of the term, and from our point of view it is the rest of you who are mad.