Monday, June 14, 2004

Carrickmines - A National Disgrace

This is an archaeological site here in Ireland, of unprecedented scale in
size and timespan and we are paving over it for a motorway. Now that should be enough to get anyone's blood boiling, but it gets better:

The site was never originally meant to be paved over, but the plans were
changed to include a feeder road from the motorway. This road goes through the site and its delay has been decried as the action of a bunch of tree-huggers and ivory-tower intellectuals. This rhetoric emanates from the ruling party here, a party racked by scandal after scandal, as one after another of its members were found to have solicited and received bribes in exchange for "favours".

Of course, the fact that the site in question is owned by a company with
strong ties to a disgraced politician (Liam Lawlor) in that same party, has nothing to do with anything and the fact the company is not actually a company:
(http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2003/09/10/story566853141.asp and
http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2002/12/19/story697172452.asp)
should not impinge on the collective consciousness of the voting public.

Tie this into the fact, that the change to the plans to go through the site only occurred after Jackson Way property had bought the site. Later, the land was subsequently rezoned as industrial, massively increasing its value. Guess who helped to rezone it. Yup, Mr. Lawlor (
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2002/1123/637495808HM1FLOOD.html).

Now, the site then had to be bought by the local council and they were then faced with a bill of 47 million euros ($56404700), instead of the 6-7 million it would have cost them as agricultural land. This money has to
come out of the public coffers and you can see how this would make a bigger dent in the public finances, than say, a few refugees just looking for a place to live (the Simpsons-esque excuse normally used here for high taxes).

(By the way, I am in no way saying that any criminal activity has occurred here, I am merely pointing out the facts as they stand and the remarkable series of coincidences that follow from them.)

This, of course, is on top of the fact that the site contains an
undisturbed record of continuous occupation for hundreds of years and as
such, is unique in Europe. Once again, we are short-sightedly destroying
our heritage for a dubious modernity.