YOU wanted to live in the countryside because you had spent your childhood in the mountains. Towns and cities had always just been places to pass through, places for looking at architecture, visiting art galleries and experiencing the hell of parking. So you packed up and moved.
There is a catch, though: the Irish countryside is being urbanised with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer run riot. Small wonder Aalen, Whelan and Stout's bestseller, Atlas of the Irish Rural Countryside, is as much cautionary tract aimed at insensitive development as it is a geography book.
Still, your haven seemed safe. After all, what county council could possibly permit the building of a modern housing estate, complete with apartment blocks, in the middle of a traditional rural landscape? Answer: most of them, if the price is right - and it usually is, by the looks of things. Respect vernacular architecture? Hah, hah, sneer the developers, we're not working for the OPW. You want heritage? Talk to an archaeologist.
At this point, it seems appropriate to say a few words about all those times you made jokes about bungalow blitz and the way that trend was threatening the natural beauty of Connemara and the Burren. Well, given a choice between bungalow blitz and the rampaging introduction of modern suburban housing estates complete with that ever-traditional touch, fluorescent street lighting, to country towns and villages, individual bungalows no longer look quite as obtrusive. Once you have driven through the vast suburb which is west Galway, you will have realised that anything is possible when it comes to developers out to make a fast buck.
House prices
Psst, got any land? Why build one house when you can cram 20 boxes on it? After all, house prices in cities have become so obscenely inflated that city people are being forced out into an alien environment they have no sympathy for and a generation of angry kids are taking revenge on places they simply do not want to live in. You can take the kid out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the kid.
How do you know? Well, you overhear the horror stories on the train. People who live in the countryside can now walk out of their houses on a dark winter morning and stare in disbelief on discovering their car has been vandalised. Just a minute, surely that only happens if you park on a city street? Not any longer. One of the many exciting aspects of the relentless urbanisation of the Irish landscape is that we can now all share the full range of the hazards of modern living. You have dogs? Keep them in. In the old days they ran the risk of being shot if they chased sheep. Now there is the very real fear of them being mown down by the crazies driving through the countryside at 90 m.p.h. And as for those kids on nervous ponies. . .
Social problems
While the haves are busy counting their money, a large proportion of the have-nots are frustrated and resentful and act accordingly. The powers that be have a solution: ignore social problems; better still export them out of cities. No one is interested in helping the poor. Ireland Inc. is concerned with arranging loans for the middle classes and amusing tourists. As for the rich and powerful, the banks have the right idea: you write off their debts; after all, you may need them.
But back to the trains, that happy hunting ground of overheard conversations. Why do you bother travelling on them? The service is unreliable. Most of the rolling stock barely rolls. There is also the fact that the air in the non-smoking carriages is often as dense as that in the smoking compartments. How many times have you sat or stood in non-smoking, while the smokers in the passageway puffed pollution right in your face? True, that usually happens only in the evening as those sad little refugees known as commuters wend their weary way home.
Mornings are different. See the happy workers slumped over the tables, heads often touching. No time for a bath this morning. Strangers on facing seats - kept apart only by the table between - groan in their sleep and arrive in their office wearing the haunted expressions of escapees. And this is only Monday, wait until Wednesday. By Friday, some of them have missed the train.
There is additional joy. Unless you are at the station at least 20 minutes before it arrives, you won't secure a parking space. If you do, you can then start to hope that, when you return, all of your tyres will still be up and perhaps, this time, the windshield won't have been scratched. Another reason for being early is that it gives you time to borrow a brush and sweep away the broken glass from the night before.
Seat for briefcase
There are a variety of commuters. Perhaps many of them do fall into a deep sleep. But not all of them. I can remember a day shortly before Christmas, oh season of goodwill, when an old man fainted on the train, and no one would give him their seat. People sat as one, ignoring his plight. Let's not forget the commuter hog, usually a business type who takes s seat for himself and another for his companion - his briefcase - and is highly offended when asked to move it in favour of a mere human.
The trains rattle along or crawl. The toilets look like the scenes of murder investigations. But there is a choice: drive. Spend three hours in traffic on a 41-mile journey, arrive at your destination with teeth-marks in the steering wheel, and savour the delights of city parking?
What about those eavesdropped train conversations? What do commuters discuss? Nature? Thoroughbreds? Christmas tree plantations? Football? Sex? No, the conversation is nearly always the same: which farmer has sold his land and how many new houses are going to be built in the woods, fields, and ruined countryhouse estate these battered-looking commuters once played in.