M3 and the uglification of Ireland

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Mock Turtle proudly proclaims his learning in the different branches of arithmetic: "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

Our own Government is fuelled by personal ambition, has been good at distracting us from the real issues, and has attracted a great deal of deserved derision. But its finest long-term achievement will probably be the Uglification of Ireland. We have inherited a country with a variety of physical beauty, from lush to stark, from prim and planned to wild and harsh, remarkable for a small island. And with last week's decision to give the final go-ahead for the M3 motorway through the Tara/Skryne Valley, we have officially opted to uglify it all.

The M3 is not just an example of stupid and unnecessary vulgarity, of what seems a perverse desire to do everything in the ugliest possible way. It is also a challenge to the whole modernising project in Ireland.

Those of us who have wanted to see Ireland liberated from the narrow dogmas of the church have always denied that such a liberation would involve our reduction to a new kind of narrow-mindedness, in which nothing matters except short-term economics.

Yet many of us surely found ourselves nodding our heads at an eloquent recent speech by Archbishop Seán Brady. He lamented the "increasing evidence of a loss of culture, evidence of a loss of sensitivity to the things of the spirit and the soul. You see it on our roads, you hear it in our language, and you read it in our papers. People are not so much rejecting as disconnecting from those things which give life to the soul. Just observe the level of preoccupation in the lives of those around you, perhaps even in our own lives.

"We are in real danger of losing our balance. Apart from the occasional upward glance at a church spire or the jolt from a personal or global catastrophe, we are less inclined to ask eternal questions, to ponder the human, to contemplate the beautiful. And when we lose this capacity, we begin to measure the value of things by their usefulness and expediency, rather than by their beauty or their being. Impatience, aggression and isolation begin to displace the culture of civility, courtesy and community."

You don't have to accept Archbishop Brady's premise - that secularisation must lead to a cruder society - to recognise the force of his challenge. It may ignore the vulgarity of much of what has passed for religion in the supposedly good old days, like, for example, the banning of books and the distrust of art and the intellect. It may also ignore the instances of greater sensitivity and courtesy that have been part of the process of secularisation, such as the vastly increased public distaste for language that abuses vulnerable minorities. But tolerance for the M3, or for the building of a motorway through the site of the bloodiest battle in Irish history at Aughrim, makes it hard to deny the archbishop's point about the impoverishment of our collective lives. If the M3 in particular goes ahead in its present form, the advent of a public culture that is incapable of recognising any values beyond the immediate and pragmatic will be undeniable.

For the National Roads Authority and its supporters, of course, all of this is vacuous guff. It is the concern of patronising, liberal, arty-farty intellectuals, hopelessly out of touch with the real people. But it is precisely those "real people" who are being patronised. If real people don't give a damn about beauty, why are the garden centres full every weekend? Why does the Tidy Towns competition engage so much energy and enthusiasm? Why do we get upset when yobs scrawl graffiti on the walls of our housing estates? What is genuinely patronising is the presentation of issues like the M3 as a crude choice between economic progress and a more tolerable commute, on the one hand, and abstractions like culture, heritage and values on the other.

In reality, it is short-term pragmatism that creates the very problems it then purports to solve. If you don't have a sense of broader values, a feeling that there is more to life than just the here-and-now, you can't set goals. If you don't know what kind of society you would like to live in, you can't plan for its creation. You end up with chaotic development, with people who can't live near their work, with services that don't meet basic needs, and with urgent cries for more short-term solutions that simply solidify the underlying problems. Nothing is less practical than pragmatism.

This is why the M3 matters. If, in the face of an international outcry, the authorities can get away with the destruction of a landscape that has been sacred for 4,000 years, they can get away with virtually anything. No historical resonance, no sense of human continuity, no notion that we have a responsibility to the future, no sense of national self-respect, can stand in the way of whatever the engineers deem to be an immediate necessity.

We will have declared ourselves a petty people, afraid to think about big things unless Mother Church is there to threaten us with damnation if we don't.