Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
It's sobering to realise that within a decade most of Dublin will, in fact, consist of housing estates in Wicklow. By which time Wicklow town will have largely spilled into Wexford, which will be mostly subsumed by Waterford, which itself will be separated from Cork by only a couple of golf courses. Although by then Cork will be known by its new name: Leeside - An Exclusive Development of Houses in an Idyllic Harbour Setting.
A couple of decades ago we watched the soulless urban sprawls of working-class Dublin and decried the nightmare created by short-sighted urban planning. Then we bought into the dream. In the rush towards new housing, the country is gradually giving way to vast, anonymous urban estates of identikit semi-Ds. Enormous places in which, at any one time, half the householders are on the phone attempting to direct delivery men to their location. "Don't take the main estate entrance; we're off the road by the dual carriageway. Drive past three greens. You'll see a turn on the right. Ignore that . . ."
Developers attempt to soften the environment by harking back to the area's pastoral past and giving the new roads such names as the Vale, the Meadow, the Hillock. Each is a delightful reminder of the vales, meadows and hillocks ripped up to put these houses there in the first place. Local wildlife would probably be thrilled at this rustic nostalgia if they weren't busy trying to salvage their offspring from the teeth of an earth mover. Of course, celebrating the present rather than the past would be far less marketable. Nobody wants to live at 23 Concrete Jungle.
Too often there has been a row before the developer hands over upkeep of the estate to the council, so the promised green is still a brown and, because the roads have waited five years for Tarmac, your car's suspension is shot from just getting in and out of the driveway. When you bought off the plans, the brochure had a bright drawing of shops and pubs, but all that got scrapped in favour of a single Eurospar 10 minutes' drive from your house.
It's a general law of urbanisation that the further from the city they are, the bigger the houses are; yet the newer they are, the worse the construction quality. So if you've just bought a new house, it's likely to be a spacious three-bed made from reinforced cardboard. You are about to become very familiar with your neighbour's nocturnal noises. Yet, despite the unwanted intimacy, community drifts away in the construction-site dust. We don't know our neighbours. The guy next door could be the friendly, residents'-committee type. Or he could keep severed heads in his fridge. Just as long as he doesn't power-hose his car at 9am on a Saturday, you really don't care.