My Time in Space, page 18
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.
*
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.
