View from the outside is not so great
By - Joe Horgan.

As RTÉ and any newspaper you care to choose are very keen to tell us most of those protesting against the motorway through the Tara valley are not locals.

In fact by all accounts two thirds of them are not even Irish.

I am never quite sure what we are supposed to make of this information. I am never quite sure why media outlets seem to stress this so much.

They were very keen to do the same about the Shell pipeline in Mayo and the protests there, though they seemed less comfortable about the fact that such was the local involvement that five Mayo farmers were actually imprisoned over their opposition to the pipeline.

The media were far more comfortable following the Government-set agenda of suggesting that most of the protestors were outsiders and it is very much the tone they are taking again with Tara.

In the case of Tara we would have to grant them that this claim is substantially true.

There is local opposition and the woman who recently chained herself underground at the site in protest was Irish but most of the protestors are probably outsiders.

They are not from the area and in many cases not even from this country.

That is the truth of it.

The point though, about those protesting being outsiders, is so bloody what?

Are all of the academics from around the world that have objected to this road just outsiders?

Are those who have put Tara on a world heritage site list just outsiders?

Is Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, who recently spoke out about the road just an outsider?

What is the undermining of opposition in that way supposed to signify?

I mean keep your nose out of it you're not from round here is hardly a valid argument in support of anything.

Is that the best supporters of the road can do? That's not an intellectual or moral or considered point of view that's just hillbilly posturing.

Stay away strangers is not a justification it's just a scary slogan.

Of course there is the continuing claim about the road freeing up the commuters of Meath from their weary lives - as if all that was amiss in those lives is the state of the road rather than the very system that forces them to live in one place and work in another whilst someone else rears their children.

Is that what the sought-after answer to mass emigration was supposed to entail?

And does anyone really believe, flying in the face of all experience and all road studies, that more roads will not in time just bring about more cars and subsequently more congestion?

It is not wild conjecture anymore to suggest that this Government has always been very closely wedded to developers and road builders.

That is simply the truth. That road has as much to do with their wealth-aggrandising agenda as it has anything else. So who cares if those objecting are outsiders? So what?

Maybe the majority of Irish people don't care one bit for the Irish environment. That doesn't mean it isn't worth caring about. Maybe the only love of land that exists in the Irish mind is that of a nationalistic bent where the land is symbolic.

That doesn't mean the land isn't worth loving. Maybe the years of poverty and cultural defeat means Irish people care more about the price of land than its intrinsic worth.

Maybe most Irish people think the best thing that could happen to the ancient landscape of the Tara/Skyrne valley is a motorway.

That doesn't mean it is.

Yet I still suspect that most Irish people do treasure these things.

I still believe that most people realise that there are things in life that have a value ail of their own.

I still think that most Irish people believe we should look after the natural and historical parts of our country.

However much they are lost in lives that overwhelm them with a different set of priorities and are battered by the misuse of the word progress when what happens is often the exact opposite they still feel the need for these other things that the developers and businessmen and politicians cannot assess.

It is also worth pointing out in a small country that has wedded itself to a vast road building and toll booth system at the expense of a public transport system what the World Health Organisation has recently said about roads.

The WHO has forecast that between 2000 and 2015 road accidents will cause 20million deaths.

Road accidents are already the number one killer of young people worldwide. It is "a health crisis of huge proportions".

Which might, you'd think, have Governments thinking about devising ways of getting people off the roads not of getting more people on them.

But then why should we listen to the World Health Organisation?

They're just a bunch of bloody outsiders.

© The Irish Post, 5th. April 2008.