My Time in Space (25 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
*
Our submission to the Minister, who had called for observations on a proposal to exchange part of the Marconi site for the 80 acres of bog owned by the Airport Group at Ardagh, had to be more carefully argued. The tone was measured, sober:
Dear Minister
We would like to thank you for ensuring that a range of opinion is
consulted
before the proposed exchange is considered…. In our explorations of this issue we have found concern on four levels: for the general tranquillity and freedom from aircraft noise of Connemara as a whole; for the
ecological
and aesthetic integrity of Roundstone Bog; for the future of the
Marconi
site itself; and for the independence in planning matters of the National Parks and Wildlife department. A summary of the arguments on each count is appended.
We present this document as responsible inhabitants of Connemara, unmotivated by commercial considerations or political affiliations, and
concerned
for the natural world as well as the local community. We trust that it will be read, and we hope, acted upon, in the same spirit of commitment to the general good….
… and so on, with inexorable urbanity, the four levels of concern sprouting into twelve numbered arguments, the document
presenting
itself as iron logic in the velvet glove of courtesy.
The outcome of this second round in the Battle of
Roundstone
Bog appears to have been successful. The Minister of State
announced that a search would be undertaken for an alternative site for the airstrip (a project he favoured in general because of the potential link to strips on the offshore islands of Inishbofin,
Inishturk
and Clare Island), and that a conservation plan would be drawn up for Roundstone Bog. This alternative site, with which he hoped to disarm both sides in the controversy, was soon located, in a less sensitive locality near the Clifden—Cleggan road. While I did not believe that an airstrip even of the small size now envisaged was necessary or desirable for Connemara as a whole, there were arguments in favour of the links to the islands. I felt that the pros and cons had been reduced to local significance and that the argument should now be left in the hands of those
immediately
advantaged or disadvantaged by the scheme. Personally I was ready to accept the new proposals as a compromise, being mindful that ongoing controversy itself is an interruption to the wellbeing of the community. Save Roundstone Bog has
evaporated
in a sigh of relief, and there is even a springtime of
reconciliation
in the air; one of the chiefs of the Airport Group has told me that I should be proud of what I had achieved for Roundstone Bog. I would qualify that by noting that no permanent institution has emerged from the campaign, to research, educate about and protect the Bog, which will always be under threat.
However it has acquired one defence it lacked before, and that is, an identity. Local people remark on the fact that visitors now enquire for it and seek it out. Until recently those thousands of acres of rocky hummocks, quaking bog, lakes and streams had no name as a whole, being regarded only as so much waste land
subject
to various turbary, grazing and shooting rights defined in terms of about twenty townlands and parts of townlands. Praeger, the first writer to call attention to its uniqueness within the British
Isles (in
The
Way
That
I
Went
,
1937), could refer to it only as ‘the great bogland behind Urrisbeg’, from Errisbeg Hill which rises out of its southern margins. So a name has long been necessary for the whole ecological unit, and somehow that of Roundstone Bog has been adopted, whereas it could as well have been Clifden Bog. While I do not think that I invented this name I cannot find any earlier written uses of it than a 1987 essay of mine in which I said that ‘at least the core of this area, which is becoming known as Roundstone Bog, having been spared by forestry and commercial turf-cutting so far, should most certainly be preserved as it is; apart from its ecological uniqueness, it harbours one of the rarest of resources, solitude’. What ignorance of conservation realities that phrase ‘at least the core of’ reveals! I soon moved on to a
realization
that the whole, together with its margins, must be conserved, for if we let the margins go then the next layer in becomes
marginal
and will be lost in the same way. When I published my map of Connemara in 1990 I took care to stretch the label ‘
Roundstone
Bog’ over the entire tract from edge to edge. It is the
ultimate
privilege of the cartographer, or topographical writer, occasionally to create a place out of nowhere.
*
I was very happy that the airport controversy had come to an end, not only because of the repeated interruptions to my own work it had caused, but because I resent the label ‘environmentalist’ that naturally attaches to me after so many published words on such themes; I fear it obscures a proper literary reception of my books. Going deeper, I feel a distressing tension between what I call ‘true writing’ and the opportunistic, rhetorical mode one can
insensibly
fall into in polemics. Never, in real writing, would I use a cliché like ‘the thin end of the wedge’ – but what a dense, sharp, formulation it is, what a handy tomahawk in a scalping raid! As for the pillaging of my books and essays for juicy phrases and memorable images to be recycled in press releases and letters to newspapers, that is in absolute contrast to my usual care not to repeat myself, for my rule is, when I find that I am falling into repetition, to take it as a challenge to rethink, to invent the unsaid. There are good reasons for the writer, the artist in any mode, not to use the skills that have been acquired in the practise of it to advance arguments in support of any already defined
position
however meritorious. True writing, art in general, is
essentially
concerned with what is yet to be defined, what may become defined through its exercise but then is to be left behind in the advance into the unknown. But if the ivory tower itself is on fire, such arguments go up in smoke! And then the best one can do is to accept the plunge into campaigning as a temporary
reincarnation
as salesperson or politician, which can be educative for the reality-starved introvert.
However, writing itself incurs obligations to its subject.
Perhaps
if I had not written that essay on Roundstone Bog I might have left it to others to fight for it when the time came. When in 1999 I heard that planning permission was being sought by Inis Meáin Co-op for three 150-foot-high wind turbines on the south shore of the island, in a landscape to which I have devoted
countless
words, I tried to ignore the fact, until it rankled so much I had to attend to it and inform myself of the details. The Aran Islands had been recently connected by submarine cable to the mainland electricity grid, and the scheme was to sell electricity to the ESB as well as to power a desalination plant. When it became clear that
no one else was going to initiate opposition, I began the all-
too-foreseeable
procedures once again. First I called the wildlife writer Michael Viney about it; he thought that I was ‘on a hiding to nothing’, given the environmentally correct connotations of wind power, but undertook to raise the subject in his weekly
Irish
Times
essay. This gave me a peg to hang a letter to the paper on:
Michael Viney’s column of 12th June mentioned proposals for windfarms on the west coast, in the context of the Heritage Council’s forthcoming document on landscape policy. Unfortunately the question has become extremely urgent and cannot wait upon longterm consideration…. I am reluctant to involve myself in this matter, but, having mapped the Aran Islands in great detail and written so much about them, I feel a degree of personal responsibility for the preservation of their particular qualities. So I am writing to the Comharchumainn of each of the three islands asking them not to go down this road of wind-power, despite its superficially ‘green’ credentials. There are places in which windfarms could be sited without much visual pollution, but the Aran Islands are not among them. In particular the Atlantic coastline, from the lighthouse in Inis Oírr to the one on An tOileán Iarthach at the western end of the island chain, is by any standards quite exceptional, and is virtually uninterrupted and unspoiled. Because this is a landscape of bare stone and the strata run
horizontally
, its skylines are stark and simple and all the subsidiary
landforms
harmonize with them in a spacious unity. The experience of walking the clifftops, or of approaching the seaboard down one of the islands’ narrow walled boreens, is profound. One is confronted by the drama of the natural world – the violence of storms, the endurance of rock, and the strange and subtle ways in which birds and plants find living-space between these mighty opposites.
But despite its grandeur this is a very vulnerable landscape. Its
perspectives
are long and wide open. Anything sticking up above the field walls is visible from far away. Nothing could be more destructive to it than the endless gesticulations of windmills. If such an interruption is sanctioned anywhere along the length of that coast the continuity will be broken, and other threatened intrusions will be harder to resist ….
I sent similar letters to other papers and to the three island
co-operatives
; and later, when it was clear that no change of heart had been effected in the Inis Meáin Co-operative by my arguments, the letter became the basis of my objection to the granting of planning permission. But the Galway County Council planners were similarly unmoved, and granted permission, so I had hastily to contact the various environmentalist organizations and
persuade
them to appeal the decision. The only reply from the islands at that stage was an abusive letter in the local paper from my old bugbear the Connemara politician, who was now the prime mover in the windfarm project. I copy out a few sentences only, the whole being too long and garbled to bear reproduction.
As Manager of Inis Meáin Community Co-op, and as a committed
promoter
of natural resource development aimed at copper fastening a viable and sustainable island community on Inis Meáin, I am happy to be branded as a potential desecrator by the Archangel environmentalist and self-styled protector of the folding landscapes of Connemara and the Aran Islands…. I have come to the conclusion that David Bellamy-like Robinson has a serious problem with the cultural and heritage attitudes as expressed by Connemara people and Aran Islands people…. If he is still hell-bent on depopulating Inis Meáin beyond viability, and if he still wants to frustrate the twenty six years of Comharchumann Inis Meáin Teo to keep the island community alive and vibrant, it would be
advisable
that he seek a mandate from the islanders for whom he feels such a degree of personal responsibility.
Such rant is easy to reply to, indeed to take advantage of, in the rough-and-tumble genre of Letters to the Editor, but it does find its audience among the ill-informed. Soon after this appeared I happened to visit a remote cottage in Connemara in search of the names of the mountain passes above it, and found that the old farmer who was proud to help me record his fast-fading oral lore was also convinced that I wanted to drive him and his like out of Connemara! But I also heard from several Inis Meáin islanders opposed to the windfarm scheme who were as sad and angry as I am about the degeneration in the look of the island over recent years, and a founder member of the Co-op, Tarlach de Blácam, resigned in protest against its manager’s unauthorized response to my observations and joined the campaign against the proposal. But, knowing the spite that can fester in small isolated
communities
, I refrained from causing any further divisions in Inis Meáin.
As it happened I visited the island soon afterwards for the opening of the newly restored ‘Synge’s Cottage’, in which, a
hundred
years ago, Synge, Pearse and other seekers for the true
Ireland
used to lodge. I reported on my impressions in another letter to the
Connacht
Tribune:
… The next day some of us strolled down to the deserted south coast of the island. The maze of little fields with its superb backdrop of the Atlantic horizon and the Cliffs of Moher had never looked lovelier. To our delight we saw a sea eagle (the first to be sighted in the Aran Islands?) sailing low over the stone walls, accentuating the wild magnificence of the scene. But then we were heartbroken to find that half a mile or so of the boreen had recently been sprayed with weedkiller and was a strip of brown desert among all this beauty. This particular boreen is to be the access road for the projected windfarm – and I noted that from immediately beyond
the windfarm site the rest of the boreen is full of wildflowers: ox-eye daisies, tall spires of yellow agrimony, bloody cranesbill and dozens of other species, among which hundreds of burnet moths were just emerging from their chrysalises. Surely something deeply wrong is going on here, morally wrong in terms of our relationship to a very wonderful natural and cultural landscape. And surely those founders of modern Ireland whose memory we were celebrating at Synge’s Cottage would have been appalled by it! … I hope that the Co-op will turn back from this wrong turning in the history of the island. And I am encouraged in this hope by the
Co-op’s
contribution to the work on Synge’s Cottage, which has shown its ability to care for the island in the right way.