Villagers: Letters to the Editor 2005-01-08

Development is a good thing. An Ireland without development would be an Ireland which stagnated, an inward-looking Ireland without aspirations or the confidence to make plans for its own future. It would be an Ireland in which our children would be taught to revere the deeds of their fathers and to undervalue their own ability to contribute.

The powerful would remain forever powerful, the poor would remain forever poor, the excluded would remain forever excluded. Nobody could want an Ireland like that.

The trouble is that, in 2004, we have used the word "development" solely in the context of building. The arguments have been fixated on building: building roads, building one-off houses, building football stadiums, building hotels, building shopping centres, building golf courses. If we build, we will develop, as a city, as a region, as a state.

For those for whom building is the panacea, it is almost immaterial how we shall use these things in the future. Certainly, they never seem to allude to, in any detail, their vision of the state of these constructions twenty years from now. Most of their energy, in fact, is devoted to condemning those who occasionally see drawbacks in this fetish for building and who demand more detailed visions of the future. People like that are "anti-development".

In Waterford, a very interesting situation arose in late 2004. In May last year, news of a discovery of a major Viking site, described by National Roads Authority (NRA) archaeologists as one of the most important sites in Europe, hit the headlines.

In September, a group of approximately 130 Waterford citizens came together and decided they would like to know more about the site. They invited scholars down to give them papers on its possible significance. They searched the internet for information. They organised a concert to raise funds and they used the funds to prepare information leaflets which they handed out to the public. They created a website in which they gathered together all known information on the site. When asked, they gave talks at local schools.

For 2005, they plan library exhibitions, more invited scholars, more school presentations, a Viking festival, visits by Viking ship replicas and a trip to the Danish Roskilde Ship Museum where the centre piece of the display is the huge eleventh-century warship built in southern Ireland, one of the biggest ever found in the Viking world.

These people are labelled "anti-development".

They are "anti-development" because the site they are interested in lies on the pathway of a feeder road outside the planned outer-ring road of Waterford. This road will provide a second outlet from the new bridge to the N25.

There are no immediate plans to build anything around this second route; it is simply considered that having two roads which bypass Waterford to the west is better than having one. The group who are interested in promoting the Viking site have said that they agree with that approach; they merely ask that the site be dug first and the results published before the road goes through. They have written to the two Ministers concerned on numerous occasions, they have asked to meet the city council, they have challenged local councillors to debate the issue. As yet, they have received no reply other than comments in local and national newspapers to the effect that they are "anti-development".

These citizens of Waterford are volunteering time and energy to educate themselves and their children about their Scandinavian past, they're learning how those in authority visualise the future for their city and they're articulating their own vision of how their community should grow.

It would be nice if, in 2005, official Ireland could deepen its understanding of what "development" entails.

CATHERINE SWIFT

Save Viking Waterford Action Group