Paul Malpas

I am still reeling from the mental onslaught I have been through these past few days and my piece yesterday confirms to me the power a blog has.  A power that has to be carefully and considerately handled to enable the readers not to have to spring up from their screens and put their feet through them.

I have only been blogging for two weeks and I am learning all the time.  My life has been enveloped by it and although enjoying the literary progress I am making, I am alarmed at the grief I have caused to some people.  I can understand how punctuation wrongly placed or a word erroneously or clumsily used can put a different interpretation on a sentence, but the reader has got to learn to read and learn how the writer is thinking and not read what  he/she wants to read.  Reading  and understanding what is written is just as much an art form as writing.  My recent blog entitled Wondering Why was such a piece.  I wrote the text wondering why 52 years of employment with one company was not acknowledged as being something to behold, a quite remarkable feat in this transient world of ours.  A feat that I cannot imagine will be repeated in a long time.  A feat that should have had the blue touch paper lit under it and allowed to fizz all over North Roscommon, let alone Boyle. A celebration and nothing more of this epic.  However people have read the piece and put their own familial or amicable interpretation on it for possibly the erroneous use of the word redundant and the clumsy use of the word ungrateful and the mistakenly poor clause This shoddy treatment deserves castigation. For this I apologise.  Others have read it as it was meant to read and applauded Dermot for his 52 years of employment.  This has indeed taught me a  great lesson and I will personally apologise over the next few days to those people who have suffered grief from it and should not have been implicated.

Which brings me to another point that I have been considering.  All things have their day and in the media it was first of all cave paintings and grunts and then smoke signals and drums and then spoken tales by wandering minstrels and poets and then books by learned monks and sometime in the 18th century newspapers made their appearance and captured our hearts and imaginations for over 200 years; but the day of the newspapers will be finished shortly.  Philip Meyer in his book The Vanishing Newspaper calculates that the last newspaper in America will be published in the first quarter of 2043 and he worked this out four years ago, so that day will have regressed with the growth of the web.  Middle ground newspapers that are neither highbrow or entertainingly populist will go first as their advertisers desert and start in the more accountable vehicle that the web undoubtably is.  This newspaper demise is already happening with falling share prices ensuring that share holders put pressure on big publishers to close their loss makers.  The numbers employed by journalism is falling remarkably quickly on a year on year basis and so remarkably the end is nigh for both newspapers and newsagents. What does this mean for our local rags?  I wonder when they will become defunct according to The Vanishing Newspaper’s algorithm. I could not say but I know the end is nigh.  People are tired of spending two to three euros to read the anodyne and mundane accounts of local events when you can get it for nothing on blogs like realboyle.com along with some interesting comment.  The hack is dead and the age of the maverick is dawning. What takes their place, you might well ask.  Well bloggers of course.  Citizen journalists who will of course stick to personal and local matters in the begining, but new models will arise as papers retreat.

Which brings me on to my last thought which I have just heard on the Joe Duffy show.  All our TDs are given an allowance of €10,000 at Christmas to send cards to all and sundry.  Joe Duffy has calculated this amount to be with its attendant costs in the order of €3,000,000.  On this day after such a fierce Budget would it not be nice to wander the towns of Ireland with this amount in your pocket giving out to the poor and needy and feck the Christmas Cards?

With the flood waters retreating, they are down 500mm at the Wooden Bridge across from the house, the work of cleaning up and inquest get under way.  Most of the verbal rubbish ensuing is coming from politicians, both local and national and from state aided local institutions like CLEAN or Cavan and Leitrim Environmental Awareness Network who come out of the woodwork every now and then to moan and groan about developers and planning authorities building on natural flood plains in a retrospective beef instead of at planning stage when their energies might have more effect.

Developments in flood plain in Carrick

If building on flood plains was a no no there would be no New York, No Belfast, no Bordeaux wine growing region and most of Holland, Belgium and Northern France would be part of the North Sea from whence they came, rescued by engineers, hydrologists and money.  As with every problem the right amount of thought and skill applied removes the problem to a commercial one which if solved by the developers and financial houses means there is no problem at all. If the areas highlighted by the recent floods  had had these experts introduced at an early stage by planning authority and developer there would have been little problem.  Look at Woodies complex in Carrick on Shannon. a development built on a flood plain that flooded if there was a slight drizzle for two hours on a Monday morning but in this time of record water levels this development stood out like a beacon to correct design, planning and consideration. Albeit costing an arm and a leg and possibly adding greatly to development budgeting which could be the making or breaking of a specific deal, this prior thought and planning is essential.  If you build it high enough and link it to a correct drainage system and the project can afford it, the developer and his future tenants have no problem.

More floods in Carrick's flood plain

That is why the wily Mr G covered himself in glory at Wooden Bridge when the record flood levels came within 100mm of flooding the first house on his cosy development.  He just about built it high enough although he did seem to let down his cause slightly by allowing the road and driveway gullies to out fall into the said original flood plain so that rising waters first of all made islands of the first two houses.

I know there are many other reasons for these recent high water levels all of which the government of the day for the last 90 years have failed to address, but failure to confront pressing problems is a systematic weakness in this country’s political agenda. Cosying up to cronies who are doing better than you and turning procrastination into an art form is what most politicians aspire to.

What is inexcusable is when greed and laziness enter the development equation (greed by the developer and laziness by the local authority) and deliberate short cuts are made to ensure completion of the site without consideration of third parties or future tenants.  Both local authority and developer can wriggle but both are as culpable as each other.

Take for example a recent development here in Boyle. The land allocated  was on a turlough system.  Basically it is a watercourse or courses in a limestone area where land floods and empties on a regular basis without really following the laws of gravity.  It is a phenomenon unique to the West of Ireland and although not properly understood, engineers and farmers have learnt to live with its vagaries for centuries and have always treated them with respect.

When turloughs are interfered with a great deal of thought needs applying to ensure future situations do not endanger third party or tenant property.  Roscommon County Council applied a Bond for satisfactory completion and proper drainage of the land involved and not a large Bond considering the scale of things although according to the local press they are trying to hide behind its creation.  Two years ago when the development started the old men of the town with no qualifications from either National School or University were shaking their heads when they realized what was happening.  “He is in for big trouble” was the consensus.  Yet work continued without the drainage scheme being applied.  It was more important to acheive completion of the properties than completion of the ancillary drainage works.  Greed came before the fall.  The land at the rear of these new houses and houses that had been there for years, which are neither close to river or lake started to fill up and formed a lake rivalling Loch Ce itself.  The turlough finding itself disturbed just moved its position slightly, so that land that had been historically water free became flooded.  Houses, barns, sheds, gardens and septic tanks and property of all descriptions went under water and lives of old people were put at risk.  All down to arrogance, greed and stupidity in thinking the problem could be ignored.

Now there is an argument that in the hard nosed, shortcutting world of business this kind of thing is the norm and certainly the cannibalistic atitude of the Dublin developers have tended to concur and that best practice is something dreamed up by Tiger Woods, but  this very reason is why regulation and proper control by local authorities is in place.  The county council is the arbiter of right and wrong in the establishment of correct construction procedures and in this case has let itself down very badly and I hope they are accountable.

Every man has his price they say and reminders of local authority malpractice and bad behaviour are scattered about Ireland like confetti at a wedding.  We need to rid ourselves of this backsliding Fianna Fail comedy show and vote in a rainbow cabinet with Margaret Thatcher as leader, ably assisted by Judge Jeffries, Albert Pierrepoint, Robin Hood, Ned Kelly, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and General Patton. This cabinet given a sufficient mandate would soon clean up the greasy pole living we poor citizens have to endure whilst navigating our way between birth and death.  We will get no help from the Catholic Church who in these watery times are stil trying to pull their elongated sexual organs from a hole in what they thought was a dyke.

The photograph below shows Albert Pierrepoint begining to clean the greasy pole.