New roads are a waste of space and money

THERE have been numerous letters published in the Irish Examiner regarding the destruction of our archaeological heritage at Tara by road-building, and one asked, ‘Is nothing sacred?’

Clearly roads are sacred because no-one questions the need for road-building, they simply want the road ‘moved’.

Road-building is always harmful to the environment and to the lives of people who live in the neighbourhood, but a recent opinion poll showed that 50% of people considered road-building to be the most important election issue, as opposed to 25% for healthcare.

Clearly, road-building is a crusade and no sacrifice is too great. It is commonly believed that money for roads (several thousand euro per person per year) comes from a bottomless EU pot of gold, or is a paltry sum covered by road tax, but these are huge sums of money which could be spent on healthcare, education, public transport, sports facilities, etc.

Irish roads are adequate, but we are upgrading every boreen into a motorway — spending millions of euro to shave a few minutes off a journey.

This only generates more traffic, from one gridlocked town or village to the next. Public transport is almost non-existent — we have become totally car-dependent — and those without a car have become the new underclass. But if you put even half the people travelling by car into buses, you would have a bus every couple of minutes. A railway has a 100 times the passenger-carrying capability of a road, and trains can travel four times faster than the legal road speed limit. Cars are only convenient because there is no alternative.

Peak oil is reliably predicted for 2010. After this the price of oil will rocket and there will be actual shortages of petrol and diesel.

We also have an obligation to reduce global warming gases, 50% of which come from road transport, yet we choose to ignore these potentially catastrophic issues and place naive faith in a totally impractical future of technological fixes such as biofuels or hydrogen which have not even started to replace fossil fuel. By the time our road network is finished it will be like the massive stone heads on Easter Island — a useless monument to a blind and destructive obsession.

This is mass insanity. We must impose a moratorium on all road-building and redirect the money to public transport; the aim should be to reduce car-usage, not increase it as is Government policy.

Only this way will we save the future of the Ireland and, incidentally, the Hill of Tara.

Michael Job

Rossnagrena

Glengarriff

Co Cork