Ballyvaughan Signpost
Fintan O’Toole has a piece in the Irish Times today decrying the removal of the road signs at Ballyvaughan. He argues that it signals three kinds of stupidity. First, that it erodes a sense of place. Second, that it undermines local democracy. Third, that it illustrates a lack of joined up thinking between the NRA and the needs of tourism and local economy.
The argument about place is well made.
“Like the rocks on the nearby seashore, it has accumulated an exotic accretion of barnacles and seaweed, in this case about 20 signs. They point in a conventional way towards other places: Lisdoonvarna, Corofin, Killimer, Fanore, though until fairly recently there were two signs for Lisdoonvarna, one pointing left and the other right. But local businesses and attractions – BBs, Monk’s Pub, the Tea and Garden Rooms, Aillwee Cave – gradually added their own markers. The result was a kind of organic art installation, a riot of letters, colours and angles.
The signs didn’t just point to particular places, however. They also indicated a certain kind of place, an Ireland that is a little bit different, a little bit more richly textured, where place itself is a multi-layered concept. It is not a piece of Paddywhackery or of self-conscious performance for tourists. It’s a real, functional thing that happens to tell you something about the way Irish people think of where they are. … The Ballyvaughan signpost is this kind of conversation stuck on to a pole to form a prickly porcupine of possibilities. …
There are now no pointers at all to the businesses along the coast road to Black Head, one of the most beautiful stretches of Ireland. This may be a small thing in itself, but it points to three different kinds of official stupidity, each of which has had a disastrous effect. The first is the stupidity of not understanding the importance of place. Place isn’t an abstract concept. On the contrary, it’s where all the big things come together – economics and society, the past and the present, the idea of what is distinctive with the idea of a shared space. And one of the things we screwed up so mightily in the boom years was this sense of place. Putting 300 suburban houses on the edge of an old village of 200 houses, leaving the whole thing as a ghost estate, is what happens when a sense of place is lost.
For the NRA, the Ballyvaughan sign isn’t an aspect of a particular place, it’s an affront to the proper sense of placelessness. They see the village as an obstacle to be driven through in the most efficient manner possible. As an NRA spokesman explained: “The purpose of signing on the road network is to promote safety and efficiency by providing for the orderly movement of traffic”. The sin committed by the signpost is that it exceeds its proper purpose of being exactly like every other signpost.”
The other two arguments are a bit more tricky. Admittedly we’re talking about a signpost here and there is latitude for some commonsense and pragmatism, but at the same time one of the prime reasons we’ve ended up in the mess we’re in is because of a lack of good governance and the fact that we haven’t been following sensible rules and procedures. The reason we have ghost estates on the edge of villages is not solely because a sense of place was lost and local democracy was not allowed to operate. In fact, local democracy in the form of councillors were allowed to lose the run of themselves and good practice around planning failed to take place. There is a clearly a tension here between being over-officious and leaving things too loosely governed.
Exceptionalism is always a difficult issue to deal with. Exceptionalism around one road sign is okay. All road signs and it becomes a major issue. Clearly a balance has to be found between local interests and good governance and democracy.
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
June 21, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Although argument from the particular to the general is academically frowned upon, nevertheless Fintan O’Toole demonstrates an insight into the processes of mis-government that have brought us to the brink of destroying that very character which has made the country unique.
Back in the 1980’s I once actually heard a Local Authority Engineer say that our villages should be tidied up in order to make them nicer places to drive through. Fintan O’Toole has shown with abundant clarity that this mindset persists today and may even be growing more pervasive.
At the turn of the century, big government sought to “improve” local government by a series of “reforms” that in fact had the opposite effect. Older, more experienced and more responsible councillors were “set aside” so that their places could be taken by younger, inexperienced and less principled representatives.
The relatively “flat” hierarchy of local government was extended by an additional two levels creating time-wasting management “silos” and eliminating professional expertise where it was most required.
The new planning system was to be controlled by Ministerial directions and Guidelines and by statutory local area plans. But successive Ministers made it clear, that notwithstanding any restriction that might be promulgated in a guideline, if a political expedient was necessary, then the offending guideline would amended.
So the Retail Guidelines were amended to permit IKEA to locate at a major motorway junction, something forbidden anywhere else in the country. The demand for retail floorspace was to be controlled in terms of floor area, but the arithmetic ratio necessary to translate spending into floorspace hadn’t been measured in over twenty years. Nor would any attempt be made to publish an official measurement of this ratio perhaps lest publication bring clarity rather than confusion.
Local Area plans were mandated by law so as to ensure that more and more houses could be built as official government policy despite the fact that Government was being told by its own independent consultants that there was no demand for this housing. These embarrassing reports were of course only published after the fact.
So today, we have more than eighty planning authorities and we have nearly five hundred local area plans. Not satisfied with this, another law has been promulgated in 2010 to allow the Minister to control what may be written in this growing number of local area plans, should he be dissatisfied with the words he finds therein.
I think it was Churchill who said that if you have ten thousand regulations then you have no respect for the rule of law. We may not yet have ten thousand plans but we certainly no longer have respect for principles of proper planning. And this situation has been created as a direct consequence of deliberate government policy and law-making – not by some rogue councillors losing the run of themselves.
The loss of one old signpost may be nothing to cry about, but like Proust’s Madeleine it should bring us to the realization of the other things that we have lost as a direct and provable consequence of political corruption – not at local level but at the highest levels in the land. Every now and again it may be a good idea to take a good hard objective look at our laws and their logic rather than blaming the usual suspects, our local councillors. Remember that these same Ministers were the ones that wanted us to abandon “our stupid auld pencils” too.
June 21, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Richard, I agree with much of your analysis, but poor and irresponsible planning decisions at local level is by and large the responsibility of those who made them. When such decisions are made on a very frequent basis, and some local authorities chose to regard guidance which stated to have ‘regard for’ to mean ‘totally disregard’, it can hardly be surprising when the centre moves to intervene. Central government policy through tax incentives, regional targets, etc. fuelled development, but local decisions decided how it was organised and where it went. The planning legislation provided a framework in which decisions were made but did not dictate them, and there are still decisions being made, both locally and nationally, that are highly questionable, as the casino in Tipperary illustrates. Even if the laws are not ideal, that does not excuse local and national actors from poor decisions that fly in the face of good practice and guidance. I agree that planning needs to be looked at all levels, including local government reform which allows local authorities to raise/manage local/property taxes and which also makes them responsible for all the costs of servicing developments.
June 22, 2011 at 7:48 am
Rob, the sentiments of the Department of Local Government are best expressed by Yeats;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The Department likes to think and talk of itself as the “centre”. It arrogates all wisdom and knowledge to itself. But is it wise and all-knowing? Are local authorities the sole makers of “poor and irresponsible planning decisions”?
You aver that “to have regard for” is locally interpreted as meaning “total disregard” but in so doing you are ignoring the equal nonsense where a local authority is obliged by law to have regard to the population targets of The Minister or any Minister of the Government. It may then surprise you to learn that while the Minister for Local Government has indeed published population targets in respect of physical planning, the Ministers for Transport, Education and Health are pursuing different targets.
You must be aware that the casino decision was made by that other great reality distortion field – An Bord Pleanala. The decision was made by the Board contrary to the inspector’s report. Is this not an example of centre and periphery in perfect harmony?
You agree that our laws are not ideal and our guidelines are somewhat less than fit for purpose and that central government policy fueled development. But you imply that the backstop to this chain of anarchy ought to have been the humble local authority; perhaps “the rough beast” slouching toward the Council Chamber to be born in the light of good planning practice.
If the system displays anarchy at every higher level aren’t you asking rather a lot of local authorities?
June 22, 2011 at 11:25 pm
As a piece of sculpture, those signposts are fantastic. But I’m with Rob, you wouldn’t want all signposts to be like that.