The reign of the road

We know that our vast readership might have been questioning our sanity lately, given our seemingly quixotic rantings about motorway building in County Meath. We could not have been more pleased, therefore, to see a front page Washington Post article on Saturday about ... motorway building in County Meath [article also picked up by the Philly Inquirer]. It's a pretty decent account of the disputed motorway and its proximity to Tara, and works in mentions of its more new agey opponents, whom we had posted about a while back.

But we do think the article is a little too locked into the narrative of locals wanting the motorway and outsiders being against it. There's a lot more going on than that, including concerns about overdevelopment and the fact that the National Roads Authority has viewed the motorway as an all-or-nothing option, ignoring less radical upgrades of the existing roads. But three cheers to the Post for giving the issue such prominence.

One other point, something for which we don't fault for the article for missing, but which highlights another reason for controversy. Besides all the archeological concerns of this and other motorways, the road building has also prompted suspicions of the property dealings that go along with them. And why wouldn't people be suspicious, with public tribunals still trying to sort out a legacy of 30 years of corrupt land dealings by prominent Fianna Fail politicians?

And so, with this in our mind, we noted one particularly interesting interviewee in the Post article:

On a typical evening, traffic heading northwest from Dublin slows to a crawl from the interchange with the M50 all the way to the burgeoning town of Navan 20 miles away. Tommy Reilly, a local politician who runs a newspaper shop in Navan, says that when he opens at 6 a.m., the main road, which goes through the middle of each town, is already choked with traffic and fumes of commuters heading south.

Ah yes, Tommy Reilly, Fianna Fail candidate in the forthcoming Meath by-election -- if he is able to sort out the paperwork for a dodgy land deal he did with a well-known political operative and registered in the name of a South Pacific shell corporation. Our ancient ruling classes did things like building Newgrange and converting the country to Christianity. The modern one has rather more base concerns.