Visitors don’t come to see our motorways

HAVING visited Ireland many times, I’m familiar with the social and economic changes that the country has been undergoing for the past 15 years.

When I first visited in the 1980s, I was astonished to find such extensive carelessness about nature and environmental pollution.

I told everyone I met how we in mainland Europe were facing huge difficulties in keeping our forests alive and mitigating the damage done to nature not only in Germany, but in Italy and France as well.

Your island has been lucky over the centuries to have had such a good climate thanks to the Gulf Stream. Your grass is still the greenest in the world and your air has a sweet odour I wouldn’t find anywhere else.

I love Ireland, but it saddens me to read about the Galway water crisis and I get really distressed when I hear of bulldozers in the area around Tara clearing that sacred ground for a motorway.

Looking at Ireland from abroad, it is impossible to understand why the Government seems to approve irreversible damage to the very part of the country that draws people from all over the world and defines the cultural image of the country.

What are visitors looking for in Ireland?

We seek evidence of ancient ways of life and traces of Celtic ancestry and language.

We want a glimpse of the pre-Christian era and to be inspired by your ancient places — just as we are inspired by your literature, songs and music .

Take the sources of this inspiration away and Ireland will be left to the emptiness of self-repeating gestures, boasting what it used to be like, having lost a transcendent connection that is older than Christianity.

People don’t come to see your island home for its great motorways.

No, they come to see its greatest asset — a landscape that is still mostly unspoiled.

I live in Berlin, but I come from a small town in southern Germany where they have been committing similar follies recently — building department stores that no one needs in market places dating from the 13th century.

Please, save the Gabhra Valley as a world heritage site to be appreciated, if not by this generation, then by the next.

Nicole Haibach

Scheiblerstrasse 22

12437 Berlin