Sligo is unique, not just because of its indelible association with the poetry of W B Yeats or even its splendid setting beneath Ben Bulben and Knocknarea. What sets Sligo apart from other towns in Ireland, and even Europe, is that its engineers are planning to drive a four-lane highway right through its heart.
The Bishop of Elphin, Dr Christopher Jones, has called this plan "immoral". No fewer than 52 houses - most still lived in - are scheduled for demolition to facilitate this immensely destructive road scheme, which is backed by Sligo Corporation, Sligo County Council and the National Roads Authority.
Proportionately, in terms of population, it is as if Dublin Corporation was proposing to demolish 1,500 buildings in the inner city to create extra road space for traffic. That was the scale of the corporation's ambitions, but not any more; the emphasis in Dublin now, as elsewhere, is on public transport and traffic calming.
Apart from the introduction of disc parking, there is no evidence that the new thinking on traffic has had much impact in Sligo. Though sections of the N4 still consist of a tight two-lane road, without hard shoulders, the last six or seven miles bypassing Collooney is an excessively wide fourlane dual-carriageway.
Sligo's road engineers plan to bring this newly-built Via Triumphalis right into the town to connect with a four-lane bridge across the Garavogue River - opened in 1987 by Ray MacSharry, then Minister for Finance - which in turn links up with the N15 to Bundoran and the N16 to Enniskillen.
Gabrielle Finan knows all about this "monstrous" scheme. A former Ursuline sister who recently took early retirement from her career as a primary teacher to work with the homeless, she has led the campaign against the proposed "Mid-Block Route" which would literally hack its way through the centre of Sligo.
Ms Finan, a wonderfully warm and determined woman, lives in a fine house on St Mary's Terrace which would - if the engineers got their way - end up second next door to the proposed highway. Three of the neighbouring houses, one of which has been boarded up for nearly 18 years, would be demolished by the scheme.
She knows Sligo town like the back of her hand and took us on a tour of the MidBlock Route, which has been on the stocks since 1981. Two county managers have come and gone since then and Mr Ernan Hession, the county engineer who originally designed the route - "it was his baby", she says - died last year.
We started at College Road, a narrow, leafy country lane right outside Summerhill College - Sligo's largest boys' secondary school, with 1,000 pupils. "It's a sacred avenue for all those lads and when they pour out of the college at 1 p.m., motorists are quite happy to wait on the corner for them to come down. It's like the Puck Fair!"
The narrow lane, currently a cul de sac, is a favourite place for walking and enjoys a distant view of Ben Bulben to the north. But if the engineers get their way, "the whole place would be gone", she says, because the four-lane dual-carriageway would "batter its way through the fields" from Carraroe to College Road.
It would run right past Summerhill's boundary wall and the school's swimming pool. Further on, it would encroach on the Parson's Field, taking away several trees, and on the opposite side of the lane she believes St Joseph's Hospital could lose its porch. And then the road scheme starts hitting houses.
A row of four houses at the bottom of College Road are already derelict and in Sligo Corporation's hands; "they were left to go to rack and ruin over the past 20 years", Ms Finan complains.
Four more two-storey houses on nearby Flynn's Terrace, still occupied, would also be demolished to make way for the road.
Opposite the three substantial bay-windowed houses on her own St Mary's Terrace, which are also due to be pulled down, the route would "curve through" Upper John Street, taking away another row of more modest terraced houses, and then into the backland area between Adelaide Street and Wolfe Tone Street.
Sections of the back gardens of houses here would also be sacrificed, but there would not be sufficient space left on either side of the highway to produce anything resembling a streetscape; the new road would be fronted by nothing more than boundary walls on either side. It certainly would not look like an urban "street".
The highway would also "cut off" Sligo's railway station from the rest of the town centre and from the bus station on the corner of Adelaide Street. Given that the Dublin-Sligo line has been hanging on by the slender thread of a single track for much of its length, Gabrielle Finan believes this is the last thing that should happen.
On Lord Edward Street, three more houses are blocked up awaiting their execution. Other houses threatened with demolition are vacant, including two on either side of the home of Mrs Brigid McGoldrick, who has refused to move out despite the increasingly desolate atmosphere in the area, induced by planning blight.
Further on, at Union Place, a detached 19th century house beside one of the stone warehouses is now a roofless ruin for the same reason; it was inhabited until about 10 years ago.
And on nearby Bayview Terrace, three of the seven lovely stone-fronted houses which make up a unified composition are also scheduled for demolition.
Little else stands in the way of the highway reaching its target - the 1987 Hughes Bridge over the Garavogue, named after a former Mayor of Sligo.
Gabrielle Finan is convinced that this bridge is in the wrong place and now requires the Mid-Block Route to "feed it". She believes it should have been built further downstream.
The Concerned Citizens' Action Group, which has been fighting the road plan since 1981, has proposed an alternative route for the N4 - more of a ring road for Sligo than the "Inner Relief Route" favoured by the engineers. And according to Ms Finan, it could be implemented without having to demolish a single house.
It could be brought in through open countryside from the existing roundabout at Carraroe, where the new dual-carriageway ends, to the IDA industrial estate at Finisklin which, incredibly, is accessible only by going through the town centre. The road that serves it is so quiet it is used by Sligo people learning how to drive.
From there, traffic on the N4 could use the road through the docks to get to Hughes Bridge. "It's wide enough for a little place like Sligo," Ms Finan says. "But I don't think they want to look at this option seriously because they're afraid of losing face.
"Yet they must know the Mid-Block Route is wrong. Everybody knows it's wrong."
What she finds really galling is that the elected members of Sligo Corporation have twice voted by seven to five in favour of the engineers' plan, trusting that the "experts" have got it right. "What's wrong with them that they can't open their minds to reality and all the concern about traffic and the environment?"
The last vote took place in February after the National Roads Authority had sanctioned the Mid-Block Route. Perhaps the seven councillors who voted in favour cannot visualise how devastating it's going to be, this "raw intrusion into a small-scale community", as the action group has consistently described it.
When the scheme was originally devised in 1981, there was very little environmental consciousness in Ireland. "Do you think I'd be at this if the world hadn't changed in the past 20 years?" Gabrielle Finan says. "We believe it's not what the European Commission wants and we've been over to Brussels to make our case."
She would love to take Monika WulfMathies, the independent-minded Commissioner for Regional Policy, on a tour of the route to see the devastation it would cause. "We believe that Brussels is on our side. After all, there are EU directives against destroying communities for the sake of catering for traffic," she says.
There is also a European input into the work of the action group through Mr Wilhelm Bodewigs, a Sligo resident and spokesman for the local Green Party. He has put forward the idea of building a 7.5 km light rail line running through the town centre from Carraroe to Lisnalurg, on the road to Bundoran.
Mr Bodewigs is acutely conscious of the mistakes made in Germany in the 1960s and of the measures taken there in recent years to improve public transport, cycling and pedestrian facilities. Yet his contribution to the debate in Sligo has provoked a former Mayor, Councillor Matt Lyons, to suggest he should "go back to his own country."
The only official effort to put a brake on Sligo's road engineers was made in 1993 by the then Minister for the Environment, Mr Smith, who sent them back to the drawing boards. Consultant engineers McCarthy and Partners were brought in, but they endorsed the controversial scheme, subject to minor modifications.
The action group is now awaiting publication of an environmental impact statement on the Mid-Block Route, which is being co-ordinated by McCarthy and Partners. "We're still hopeful that they will see sense in the end and opt for the ring road instead," Ms Finan says. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing all of this."
Ten days ago, the action group held a fund-raiser at the Tower Hotel in Sligo. All of the food was prepared by its members and over 300 tickets were sold at £5 each. The raffle included such prizes as a "monster hamper" worth £120, as well as a "cuddly teddy", electric curling tongs and a box of chocolates. It was a great success.
Mr Damien Tansey, a local solicitor who represents the action group free of charge, said the event proved it was not just "a few crackpots" who opposed the road scheme. "Sligo is the part of the planet that's special to us - and it's worth fighting for," he said. "Buildings can be built very quickly, but communities take years to build."