CHAOS AT THE CROSSROADS

Chaos at the Crossroads is a catalogue of the sloppy thinking, political chicanery and bureaucratic incompetence that characterised so much of what happened in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. It charts how the country was being wrecked by half-baked policies that fail, and are known to fail, whether it was urban-generated housing in rural areas, the relentless sprawl of our cities, the madness of the motorway programme, the scatter-gun approach to decentralisation, or the gross failure to observe our international obligations to combat climate change. Evidence that would underpin sensible decisions was either blithely ignored or never gathered in the first place.

Major controversies of the recent past are covered, right around the Republic, from the proliferation of holiday homes in Donegal to the Shell gas terminal in Mayo, the gross under-use of Shannon Airport, the toxic waste incinerator in Ringaskiddy, the plan to run a road over the Woodstown Viking site in Waterford, the height of the Dublin Port Tunnel, and the M3 motorway running close to Tara. The authors outline how Dublin dominates everywhere else, via the spokes of a motorway network radiating outwards from the M50.

There is an alternative. It’s the idea of closely knit cities, with Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford working together with their collective energies counter-balancing the capital. This book also puts forward proposals on how to make urban life work better, how to get around cities and travel between them. It sends a warning of what is likely to happen if the blasé to-hell-with-the-next generation approach is allowed to prevail – chaos.