My Time in Space (24 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
All looked hopeful for them until the boundary change came to light and it appeared likely that permission would not be granted. A furious row broke out in the local press; property values were being affected by faceless bureaucrats who could arrive out of the blue and draw a red line around your land that prevented you
profiting
from it, without even informing you of the fact. The Clifden Airport Group launched an energetic campaign against such oppressions, drawing on the support of farmers who were incensed to discover that they were no longer eligible for grant aid towards the afforestation of their ‘waste land’ if it lay in an ASI. Eventually the question went to the High Court and the ASI procedure was found to be unconstitutional – quite rightly, from the point of view of commonsense and justice, but at some cost to the environment throughout Ireland, which is still awaiting the implementation of the revised scheme of designations, the ‘Special Areas of
Conservation
’. The outcome in Connemara – largely the fault of the OPW – has been an anti-environmentalist backlash, which is only now fading as another thoroughly commercial reality makes itself felt; the tourist’s liking for unspoiled scenery.
At the height of the dispute Leo Hallissey, a schoolteacher in north Connemara who also runs annual courses for adults on the environment, asked me to participate in a series of public
meetings
with the aim of explaining to the public why Roundstone Bog was worth conserving. (To those who had scraped a
laborious
living off it by sheep-rearing, and who were just discovering the financial delights of forestry and machine turf-cutting, this was by no means obvious.) Hastily Leo and I, and a few people we could count on for effectual support in the neighbourhood, named ourselves as ‘Save Roundstone Bog’ (which, we explained, in a phrase that became wearisome to me, was ‘an ad hoc group of concerned residents’). SRB’s first public meeting, in
Roundstone
, was fairly well received; the Roundstone people had not been much infected by the Clifden enthusiasm for aeronautics, which they rightly suspected would benefit principally a few hotels in Clifden itself and the golf course nearby. But our second meeting, boldly staged in a hotel lounge in Clifden itself, was eventful; in fact I found it most disturbing and exciting. The
Clifden
business interest was there
en
masse
– in fact ‘mass’ was the impression given by their bulky black overcoats filling the back of the rather cramped and overcrowded room. After three or four brief talks (on the wildlife of the Bog, on its scenic values and the artists it had attracted, and – my echospheric contribution – on its placenames and folklore), there was a general discussion which rapidly became extremely contentious. A populist Connemara politician with whom I had had one or two previous disputes over environmental matters worked himself up into a fury over a letter to the
Irish
Times
from David Bellamy, the respected
conservationist,
eccentric presenter of TV wildlife programmes and
eminent
Professor of Botany, whom we had canvassed for his support in this controversy. Professor Bellamy had written, tactlessly enough, that
Yes, the tourist potential of the key areas of the Irish heritage must be opened up, but it must be done in a totally environmentally friendly way. To even consider siting an airport, or any other development, within the Roundstone Bog catchment area is an act of pure stupidity and vandalism.
Here we have, roared the politician, brandishing the newspaper, someone with an address in London saying that Connemara men are vandals! – and he continued with such rage against this
Englishman
, as he insisted on calling him, that one of the Airport Group’s more physicalist supporters suddenly leaped out of their ranks at me with fist clenched, roaring, ‘And here’s another … Englishman we should throw out!’ Fortunately he was some
distance
from me and his impetus spent itself on empty air. For a while there was uproar. I was shocked, and at the same time
exhilarated
. Obviously the interruption could only be to our
advantage
. I stalked up and down with a long face while Leo, who was in the Chair, tried to quell a shouting match. Then I solemnly demanded silence, emphasized that something extraordinary had just occurred and that such a remark had never been made to me in all my twenty years of living and working in the west of Ireland, and I called on the meeting to repudiate it. Our supporters in the audience all rallied round with paeans of praise for my
contributions
to Irish culture; there was a formal motion
condemning
the intervention, which the opposition party had to support; and we returned home the moral victors.
Victory on earth proved more elusive. The dispute has lasted more than a dozen years now and has gone through many phases it would be tedious to detail. Every stage has demanded the
writing
of innumerable letters and e-mails, the calling of meetings,
circulating
of petitions, soliciting of expert opinion, raising of funds. The Airport Group organized a plebiscite in west Connemara and
doorstepped house to house; we held aloof from it, knowing we would lose handsomely and relying on the claim that this was not a question to be settled by local headcount. Here I am in the
middle
of their campaign, responding to a hostile columnist in the local paper, the
Connacht
Tribune
,
in which most of the verbal
battles
have been fought:
THE BATTLE OF ROUNDSTONE BOG
These are madding times in Connemara. Even as I write I hear a
loudspeaker
car drumming up attendance for a pro-airport meeting with a cheerful song that sounds from here as if it were trying to rhyme
Connemara
with banana. My Apple Mac is red hot from drafting appeals, rebutting criticisms, sharpening shafts, even trying its hand at ballads on the Roundstone Bogodrome. I enjoy the cut and thrust of the debate; sometimes I cut deeper than I’d intended, and regret being carried away by my indignation at some slur on a colleague which is difficult to counter without disproportionate, detailed, fuss. But below this superficial
excitement
there is sadness and weariness and disgust.
Disgust, for instance, at the bleating of meaningless slogans (‘People First! Vote for Progress!’). Disgust at the whiff from attitudes and misconceptions that I had thought dead for decades (‘Let the
environmentalists
come to Connemara on donkeys since that’s the sort of society they want to preserve!’). My weariness is induced by the endless re-use of
arguments
that have been demolished a dozen times in print. These come up in abbreviated form nowadays, like ‘It’s only a bit of old bog!’ – as if there were no distinctions to be noted between upland bog and the rarer oceanic lowland blanket bog, between bog that has been ruined by machine turf cutting and bog that is still miraculously intact, and above all between all other bogs and Roundstone Bog itself, which has no parallels anywhere on the Earth! Or this other argument, the jewel in the intellectual crown of
the airport lobby: ‘All we want is thirteen acres! Aren’t the People of
Connemara
worth thirteen acres of bog?’ This is the area to be taken up by runway, access roads, etc., and of course it is very small and is being used to imply that negligible damage will be done by the project. However,
runways
and roads are essentially linear features and their area is not the important factor. After all, a cut is something of negligible area, but can be lethal. The other half of the argument, invoking the People of Connemara, is of course standard demagogic tactics, discounting the views of all those people of Connemara and elsewhere who happen not to agree, and
ignoring
commonsense doubts about whether an airport really would have enough effect on unemployment in the long term to justify irreparable
damage
to the beautiful scenery on Clifden’s doorstep. However, we shall hear the argument again, I prophecy, and again and again and again.
But sadness is the most abiding emotion I feel about this dispute, for many reasons, private and public. A well-argued article (with the
conclusions
of which I disagree) in the
Connacht Tribune
of a fortnight ago tells me that ‘Tim Robinson appears to have misread the airstrip situation entirely. It must be painfully obvious to him that his opposition to the airstrip is not widely appreciated and contrary to what the majority of Connemara people want for their community.’ Well, I am not a pollster or a politician, I don’t arrive at my opinion by reading the public mood or estimating which way the majority will swing. If a writer has a function in the community it is to try and think things out for himself or herself, and not just in a tiny local and short-term context either. It is indeed painful to be embroiled in a dispute with some of the inhabitants of the place I have made my home in, but I have only once been abused as an Englishman – and even that incident, which shocked me at the time, was, I am told, no worse than many an altercation in the Council chamber …
To see what really matters about the project, what the landscape really is, other than a source of money, walk out of Clifden across the old
Ardbear
bridge as generations of local people and visitors have done, and look at the view from the little hill of Dúinín. Immediately below is a little stream flowing into and out of a small lake, by which is a picturesque patch of old woodland. On the far side of the stream, in the bog, is a strange rectangular boulder of rough marble, where the famous Father Myles
Prendergast
used to celebrate Mass in secret, in the years of oppression that
followed
the defeat of the French-led rebellion in 1798; he was a participant in that tragedy and afterwards escaped from prison to live as an outlaw in Connemara for several decades. This rock, then, is the foundation stone of the Clifden congregation, of which he is listed as the first parish priest. Beyond that the bog spreads wide, golden or purple or grey according to the seasons, flowing up and over a low rise into a labyrinth of streams with a hundred lakes, as far as Errisbeg Hill, which arches its back like an angry cat against the southern sky. Such sights are good for the soul!
Clifden
holds something in trust here for the human spirit, for ever. And just here, between the lake and that first low ridge, is where they want to put in three-quarters of a mile of concrete runway, access roads, a terminal building, high wire fencing and parking for a hundred cars. Please, do not let them do it.
*
Despite a satisfactory result for the Clifden Airport Group in the plebiscite, some years then passed in which the project seemed to have been abandoned, most people having come to the conclusion that in economic terms it was a fantasy. Then in 1998 the sleeping dog woke. The Group was now looking at another site, on the western margins of the Bog, which for historical reasons happened to belong to the State. Wearily I once more rounded up the faithful ad hoc and alerted the national environmentalist organizations:
ANOTHER THREAT TO ROUNDSTONE BOG
The tranquillity of Roundstone Bog, probably the finest stretch of lowland blanket bog still left relatively undamaged, is threatened once again by a proposed Clifden Airport. The Clifden Airport Group, a private
company
, now wants to put a 600-metre strip on the bog in Derrygimlagh by the remains of the Marconi Telegraph Station (disused since 1922), which belongs to the State. The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms. Sile de Valera, and the Minister of State Éamon Ó Cuív, are considering leasing part of the Marconi site for this purpose to the
Clifden
Airport Group.
Save Roundstone Bog, an ad-hoc group of local residents and others concerned to protect the environment, are actively opposing the project. Bord Fáilte, The Heritage Council, An Taisce, BirdWatch Ireland, Irish Wildlife Trust, Irish Peatlands Conservation Council, Earthwatch, and Voice of Irish Concern for the Environment, as well as PlantLife and the Conservation Council in London, have all expressed their concern.
Eminent
wildlife experts who oppose the scheme include Prof. Victor Westhoff, Prof. David Bellamy and Éamon de Buitléar. A large number of individual objections have gone in from Connemara and elsewhere,
including
several from local hoteliers, business people and farmers.
The Marconi site itself is not included in the proposed Special Area of Conservation which will give most of Roundstone Bog some protection, but it immediately adjoins it and is an integral part of the whole bog
complex
, only separated from the rest by a narrow lake, Loch Fada. Because it is so close to the heart of Roundstone Bog, any development here would intrude on the silent beauty of this unique tract of wilderness and
compromise
its status as a wildlife habitat…. Even a small strip could be the thin end of the wedge. Once the ban on construction is breached, there is no knowing what might be allowed in the future: a flying club? a holiday
village
? Job creation is important, but developments that damage
Connemara’s
most attractive features to the visitor, its spaciousness and peace, are not the way to go about it.