What is going on is indefensible. Planning decisions with vast and irrevocable consequences are being made in the counties around Dublin, with certain ruination to follow. Let me start with Ballymore Eustace and declare an interest.
I live a few miles away from it and I divide my shopping between it and Blessington. It is a lovely little village, an almost classic model of the small Irish hamlet, virtually identical today to how it was 50 years ago. It has half-a-dozen pubs, a medical hall, four general shops, a draper's, a hairdresser's and two churches. It is a courteous, agreeable place, where shopping and talking are indistinguishable activities, where people leave the keys in the ignition when they park, where there is a deep (if largely unspoken) sense of community and community values.
Question of scale
What makes Ballymore is scale. Ballymore is Ballymore, not Ballymun, and it is not possible for Ballymore to be Ballymore in the face of largescale dramatic change; yet this is precisely what Kildare County Council has decided should befall a village which at the moment contains about 200 houses. The county council has now granted planning permission for 416 houses, with 675 car-parking spaces, on land beside the village. Ballymore will be Ballymore no more.
Why? Why has the council agreed to a development which the local community has vigorously - and to my knowledge, with almost 100 per cent unanimity - opposed? What purpose is served? And more broadly, what goes on in the minds of those who make such decisions as their eyes gaze over maps and settle on this place or that, bringing death to them as certainly as if they were using killer-ray machines? Is this what brought them into public life, that they might destroy communities and ancient settlements, and turn every hamlet and crossroads into Rathfarnham? Was this the ambition they settled on when they left school? This affair had a predictable trajectory. Land outside the village was rezoned some time ago, though of course the people of the village, being an easy-going and inattentive community which assumes that God is good and the day is long and all will turn out for the better in the end, was unaware of the implications of this. But the councillors, who do this kind of thing regularly enough, were presumably aware of the implications of the rezoning. As one of them, drunk as a skunk, told me last year, "We've f-----d Ballymore, and it's f----d for good."
He said this because he knew developers had put in a request for planning permission to build over 500 houses on the Broadleas commons on the south side of the village. When news of this broke, Ballymore erupted in rage, and there were hundreds of formal objections to the scheme.
Smaller number
After the initial uproar abated, the developers submitted a request for planning permission for a slightly smaller number of houses - at which point all previous objections, because they were to a different number of houses, became as null and void as if they had never been made. And it worked: last Monday, Kildare County Council agreed to the construction of 416 houses on 59 acres on the south side of the village. That is bad, awful; what is worse is the contagion of acquisitiveness has now taken root in the area, and other landowners outside Ballymore are queuing up to have their land rezoned as well.
This means one thing: the destruction of Ballymore Eustace. And even before other land is rezoned and other landowners are transformed into millionaires, we know that each morning some 700 cars will be attempting to get through its tiny square. The narrow streets of the village will be unable to cope, and the horrific traffic jams which have made Celbridge a legend will be visited on blameless Ballymore.
Johnstown and Blessington
Meanwhile, just down the road, the charming hamlet of Johnstown is being raped by grotesquely excessive development. The people of Blessington nearby are in despair at the way their lovely market town has, against their wishes, been turned into a rapidly expanding dormitory for Dublin. And on the other side of the Sally Gap, Delgany and Greystones, sleepy and enchanting, have been targeted for the sort of mass development which is certain to kill - let us be frank - the very Protestant ethos which makes them so special.
Is this what local government is all about? Is this its purpose, to find undamaged, intact and happy communities with common values and easy ways, and to impose colossal and unwanted development on them which will assuredly wreck the qualities and the values they cherish most highly? Is contentment a goad, a provocation to local government? And is it possible to contain this lunacy before it has destroyed every village in Leinster?