Madam, – Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey’s decision not to fund road repairs following the recent bad weather may well prove to be an inspired one. The good road had been singularly responsible for the decline in the quality of Irish culture.
The rough, broken and pot-holed road, had for generations been the backbone of the high reel, jig and polka. Their ebbs and flows mirroring the musician’s journey to the dance hall. In the days before AA Roadwatch, a mere listen to the mighty Kilfenora Céilí Band told the listener of the bumps, the humps and the dips on the road to Co Clare. Yet at the height of the Celtic Tiger, bands such as The Corrs became pampered with their good roads to Dundalk and beyond.
This so-called infrastructural change directly influenced music so bland that the fiddle became the most common instrument on MTV. Duke Ellington had taken the A Train, Nat King Cole drove Route 66 and Chuck Berry was happy with no particular place to go, yet all presented the most fantastic soundscapes. There is a lot more poetry in The Rocky Road to Dublin than proceeding to Junction 1 of the M50 and merging with the N1.
It was Flann O’Brien in The Third Policeman who noted the dignified and generous nature of our old roads, “going out of their way to visit villages that no one else would bother with”. That was when roads had personalities like “The Long Mile”, “The Strawberry Beds” or the evocative “Raglan Road”.
Now, in a dyslexic nightmare it’s all M50, M7 or the R415 formally known as the Old Bog Road.
Where the common person sees the hole, Mr Dempsey sees the soul, and I admire that. – Yours, etc,