Thanks to Fintan O’Toole Irish Times article about Bertie Ahern this weekend (Sat, Jun16)(http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/newsfeatures/2007/0616/1181771177107.html), I have a readymade link between urban construction, destruction, Ireland and China.
‘No Irish political leader has ever been so openly contemptuous of environmental concerns. This is the Taoiseach, after all, who complained in 2003 that every big infrastructural project has to “go through eight hoops, through all environmental, planning and blah blah blah, and every blah costs a few hundred million”. This is the Taoiseach who loftily dismissed all objections to motorway routes as being about “swans, snails and people hanging out of trees”, and who sighed with envy in Shanghai at the power of a Chinese mayor to bulldoze everything in his way: “Naturally enough I would like to have the power of the mayor that when he decides he wants to do a highway and, if he wants to bypass an area, he just goes straight up and over”.’
Perhaps I can be one of the people hanging from trees, or a swan, or a snail – a brake on untrammeled bulldozing for the physical life that the Taoiseach’s list of irritating objections embodies.
Bulldozer, snail, swan, hanging body – power.
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