Chaos at the Crossroads

The long-awaited tell-it-as-it-is book from the Environment Editor of The Irish Times is published today

Frank McDonald and James Nix
Thursday, 24 November 2005

Admission n/a

Chaos at the Crossroads is a catalogue of the sloppy thinking, political chicanery, bureaucratic incompetence and pandering to vested interests that characterise so much of what is happening in Ireland today. It charts how the country is being wrecked by half-baked policies that fail, and are known to fail. Whether it's urban-generated housing in rural areas, the relentless sprawl of our cities, the madness of the motorway programme, the scatter gun approach to decentralisation, the contempt for our heritage or the failure to observe our international obligations to combat climate change, the Government has made a mess of it. Evidence that would underpin sensible decisions is either blithely ignored or never gathered in the first place.

Major controversies of recent years are covered, right around the Republic, from the proliferation of holiday homes in Donegal to the proposed gas terminal in Mayo, the gross under-use of Shannon Airport, the toxic waste incinerator in Ringaskiddy, the bizarre handling of the Woodstown Viking site in Waterford, the height of the Dublin Port Tunnel and the threat to Tara from the planned M3 motorway. The authors outline how Ireland is on its way to becoming a city-state, with Dublin dominating everywhere else, via the spokes of a motorway network radiating outwards from the M50. And we're already among the most car-dependent countries in the world, largely because of housing sprawl; with all this driving about, sitting behind the wheel of a slow-moving car is now as much a part of the Irish way of life as dancing at the crossroads was all those years ago.

There is an alternative, but the lack of political leadership has thwarted its adoption to date. It's the idea of closely knit cities, with Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford working together to counterbalance Dublin. This book also puts forward proposals on how to make urban life work better, how to get around cities and travel between them. It gives a warning of what is likely to happen if the current blasé to-hell-with-the-next generation approach is allowed to prevail: chaos.

Chaos at the Crossroads 416 pages, 244 illustrations (147 in colour), index.