Rural communities under siege from planners and developers are stillmore than willing to make a stand, writes Pádraig Ó Macháin.
One day in May 2000, Rody Neill, a neighbour of mine in Crosspatrick, Co Kilkenny, noticed that the old rectory, dating to about 1796, was being needlessly demolished by a local mining company.
He contacted the county council, but to no avail; the house was not listed. He contacted An Taisce in Dublin; it advised him to contact the county council. By the time he got to the scene, the rear of the building lay in rubble and the workmen had departed for the day.
That evening I joined Rody and a handful of neighbours from the local community. A picket was placed on the site at 6.30 a.m. the following morning, and was manned throughout the day. No further demolition took place and the ruin has recently been sold to a private buyer with a view to its eventual restoration. The local community had triumphed, unaided and against the odds.
Crosspatrick is a small rural community. My family and I moved there in 1996 having endured the delights of urban life for too long. I take the train to Dublin every morning and cycle through the engine-exhaust and universal discourtesy to my place of work.
The contrast between urban life and that of my home in Co Kilkenny could not be greater. The sense of community is so strong here as to be incomprehensible to our Dublin friends who visit us. We know everyone within a four-mile radius and everyone knows us.
Our children attend the local national school, we shop at the solitary shop at the crossroads (where once there were three shops) and socialise in the pub next door to it. We go to dances in the local hall, an old schoolhouse recently renovated by the community. We pray in the local church. Our children - two of whom were born here - hurl and kick football with local teams, they go set-dancing and pony-riding.
This is no idyllic life but it is still far removed from the picture of rural communities as depicted by urban-dwellers determined to impose foreign planning models on native settlement patterns, in the mistaken belief that the country- side would be the better for its ultimate depopulation.
New houses, where young couples hope to raise their families, are deemed eyesores and a threat to the environment. Older people are caricatured as wallowing in loneliness, aching to be transferred to an urban location. That rural people use cars is also considered a threat to the environment and to their own health from lack of exercise, irrespective of the fact that country people are the fittest humans I have ever seen.
Those native to the area accept this abuse with a natural courtesy and good humour. It is a little more trying for erstwhile city-dwellers whose homes are persistently referred to as urban-generated.
The notion that we are not part of a community, that we are "in the countryside, but not of the countryside" to quote The Irish Times, is a sophism intended, one assumes, to deter anyone so dismissively lampooned from offering arguments to the contrary.
Rural areas need constant regeneration. Economic conditions continue to force young people off the land or at least to restrict them to part-time farming. There is no room for more than one family to each farm: sub-division is no longer an option. Our local two-teacher national school has 32 pupils this year, emanating from 16 families.
This school is an educational jewel. To keep it going, new families will have to come to the area, new houses must continue to be built and not to the model of rural ghettoisation as favoured by urban planners. If those houses are not built, the school will close and that focal point will disappear; the planners will have had their way and a community will be severely damaged.
A countryside ghettoised and despoiled of its houses and people is of benefit to no one. The planners want to run their motorways free from the strictures of selfish objectors, motorways which will carry cars driven by urban-dwellers not by country people.
An Taisce wants to try out the latest American urban settlement theories on rural areas, as enunciated by its member James Nix in The Irish Times (September 17th). Unless it means "suitable for walking on", An Taisce's "walkable communities" is a greater affront to the English language than any bun- galow will ever be to the urban eye.
And all the time my neighbours and I get on with our lives, helping each other and trying to ignore the civil racism directed at us from Dublin and other urban centres.
The local rectory, which now stands only because of the local community's care for its own built environment, is a monument to that care and to the futility of the planners and the Taisceoirí.
It is a cause of optimism that communities so under siege are still willing to make a stand, at a time when the words of Myles na Gopaleen - in a virtual manifesto for An Taisce - are closer to coming true than he, through his satire, ever could have imagined:
"The Planned Man, being himself planned, will occupy his planned brain with plans and planning and will breed children so planned that they will not tolerate anything whatever that is unplanned, half- planned or misplanned. Plan less occurrences like a shower of rain will be discontinued."
Pádraig Ó Macháin is an academic and a member of the Irish Rural Dwellers Association.