What are we to make of this country's modern obsession with city life? Why do so many people presume, despite so much depressing evidence to the contrary, that life in our cities is necessarily superior?
Last July a proposal was made for a new city in the west of Ireland. It was proposed that out of the bogs of east Mayo should rise a new Atlantis, a city covering 30 square miles, with an initial population of 100,000, and designed for occupation by 250,000 people within 20 years. Fortunately, sense seems to have prevailed for nothing has been heard since of this lunatic proposal. Though backed in all innocence by some prominent people, including politicians, the Bishop of Achonry and our beloved President (herself), it was probably just a burst of summer madness. Now, however, Athlone, hitherto a perfectly adequate if nondescript and rather blowzy midlands town, has shyly revealed its own growth aspirations. All blushing modesty, it doesn't necessarily want to be a city just yet: it simply hopes to be an "emerging city". To this end, its newly-unveiled plans are relatively unambitious, involving such delights as a new town centre, pedestrian walkways, extra public housing, the renovation of derelict sites, and new community and sporting facilities.
None of us is fooled. If the town gets its way in reopening the Mullingar-Athlone railway line and the Moate railway station, and succeeds in having the new N6 Dublin-Galway road upgraded to a motorway, Athlone will emerge very quickly indeed from its town chrysalis to become a fully-fledged city. That is its clear intention.
And then it will be too late. The changes will be irrevocable. It will be of little use that Athlone will by then have been entirely reoriented (as is planned) towards the (lordly) Shannon. The entire population, dramatically grown in just a few years, will be able to spend entire days and nights staring into the great westward-flowing river without realising what has been lost: Athlone's honest-to-God nature as an ordinary Irish town - simple, unassuming, modest and down to earth.
Some of you will ask in horror if Athlone wants to be Dublin. It does not. But its chamber of commerce apparently believes that the town is "far enough from Dublin to have its own identity, while being close enough to benefit from services such as the airport".
Athlone already has its own identity. It needs no other. It is famous for - well, you know, being on the Shannon, and near lots of places. In Athlone, you aren't too far from anywhere else. That is its great attraction. If you are on your way somewhere, and coming from Athlone, you will get there quicker (on average) than anyone else. You can get home quicker too. In the very best sense, Athlone is the Emergency Town of Ireland.
But if it becomes a city, anywhere else is where many of us will want to be.
As for the identity of Dubliners, no one knows who most of them are, which is why most of them stay there. Joyce's Dub- liners portrayed his fellow citymen in situations where they were usually given one chance to change their situation and/or location, but were psychologically unable to take advantage of it. The city was a symbol of paralysis.
TO MANY people who live in Dublin, anonymity is the city's great attraction. Do the good burghers of Athlone crave similar anonymity, which will see them give up their honest open backslapping ways for a solitary life in the city shadows, where a greeting is met with wary uncertainty, and where no one knows anyone else, or wants to? I think not.
Look, Athlone, at Galway. When writing some months ago about the mad Atlantis dream in east Mayo, I noted that despite Galway's decade-long efforts to promote itself as a sophisticated city, it remains little more than a hick town: an oversized provincial centre with narrow interests and narrower streets, closed minds, a strong xenophobic streak, a distrust of the new and a complete lack of any aesthetic interest or attraction. Most embarrassing of all is the survival in Galway City of peasant redneck notions of morality and respectability, despite the superficial would-be-city veneer of modern thinking and behaviour. In its soul, Galway remains a small town; in its heart, it wishes it still was. Athlone, it is not too late to think again.
bglacken@irish-times.ie