'A nice quiet spot just out of town." Pleasant words? An agreeable way to hear your home described? Just under a month ago, this innocuous picture of where we live came to encapsulate a silent horror. It was painted by the project manager for the N11 Enniscorthy bypass scheme, working for a firm of consultants which has settled on this quiet family farm as a good location for a major road junction. I think of those words every time I look across the orchard from the front door to the oaks and beeches planted by my husband's grandfather, and uncle, pass under the arch with its bell still hanging into the yard which feels like an outdoor room, open one of the beautiful old wrought-iron gates to feed sheep or watch the red squirrels on the lawn.
The simplest of daily actions now have me fighting back the images of chainsaw on oak, bulldozers ripping out pasture and concrete mixers entombing the places where this family has worked and its children played for three generations, where I hope that my children might one day play and eventually work. This 140-acre farm, an idyllic ecological and architectural whole, would be cut into three and destroyed forever.
This is more than enough to lend life a surreal quality - but it's nothing compared to the topsy-turvy world which has gradually dawned on us since the first call from a neighbour to tell us the farm lies in the path of two out of four proposed routes for the bypass. Bad enough is the fact that we may be about to have our home taken away or, what is perhaps worse, cruelly disfigured before our eyes, by the State which we had assumed was there to safeguard our rights. But also, as thousands of property owners and occupants around the country have discovered, or are in the process of discovering, this entitles you not to concern or sympathy but to indifference or open vilification.
Our first experience set the tone. Still in the grip of the initial shock, we turned up to a public consultation day. This farm lies to the east of Enniscorthy; the national roads network to which the bypass is to connect is on the west of the town - and indeed, until a new firm of consultants was drafted in, the official plan was for a western bypass.
Can they explain their logic to us, tell us what has changed? No, the consultants and Wexford County Council officers cannot reveal any of the reasoning behind various proposed routes - on the grounds of impartiality. They cannot give answers to basic questions of fact either - the traffic flow figures, the road budget, how wide the bypass will be, whether it will be single or dual carriageway, what environmental studies have been done - on the grounds that they don't know. We seem to have misunderstood. The consultants have done a desktop study and produced a map showing some of the constraints in the area - protected sites, springs and so on - but beyond that, we are supposed to be offering them information.
Yet what we are asking for is the data we need to participate in their process, to tell them how the road would affect us and offer informed criticism of the scheme. As our frustration mounts, we begin to feel as if we are the aggressors, interrogators. We feel at fault for asking questions, yet it is clear that if we don't speak up, neither our views nor our very existence will be taken into account at all.
Determined not to allow ourselves to be disregarded, yet still waiting for someone with the common decency to notify us that they are currently weighing up whether to put a road through the farm, we go looking for information ourselves. Any mention of a roads-related inquiry elicits guarded responses from public bodies, and after a while telephone inquiries tend to be met with voice-mail. Messages, e-mails, letters, registered letters are not replied to: a neighbour is hung up on.
The Urban District Council is in the dark: it had not been notified about the new routes either. Some information does seep out - but this only increases our alarm. The county has no conservation officer, no dedicated archaeological or architectural preservation officers. It may have a local Agenda 21 officer to support policy on sustainability - but nobody is sure.
The National Roads Authority (NRA) is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and will not answer any questions. The consultants will not put us in touch with their environment section but it seems there is no intention of doing in-depth research before the route corridor is chosen. D·chas is only ready to step in at the Environmental Impact Assessment stage - and when we point out that this would be too late, that an EIA is done only once the route has been decided on, they are unmoved. We are left with the impression that they do not feel able to put too much pressure on the NRA.
Probing the bigger questions reveals just how deep-rooted is the lack of concern for people and the environment. At the consultation session, the planner looking after public relations for the road became aggressive and finally walked away from us in a fury when we asked him to explain how the scheme squared with the heavily emphasised regional and national commitments to environmental sustainability. No alternatives seem to have been considered to driving this road and many like it through virgin farmland that, once lost, will never be regained.
Public transport provision in particular is nothing short of scandalous. The situation in Enniscorthy would be funny if its repercussions were not so serious. There is no public transport whatsoever in Enniscorthy town. Three trains a day leave here for Dublin, with three trains back, none at suitable times for the area's increasing numbers of commuters. There are two coach routes - Dublin to Rosslare and Enniscorthy to Waterford. And that's not forgetting the bus to Limerick ... once a week ... in the Winter.
There is no point in trying to justify this situation, nor in denying that it is reproduced on a national scale and betrays a policy of passive encouragement of car use which needs urgent reversal.
Deepest of all, though, runs the power of the pro-road lobby groups. This N11 scheme forms part of a network of European Strategic Corridors, routes lobbied for by a group called the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), comprising heads of multinationals. One of the main political forces on the European scene for more than a decade, the ERT has a long track record of influencing budgets and policy decisions in Brussels.
Haulage is already an artificially cheap mode of transporting goods. Each lorry causes many thousand times more damage to roads than a car because of its weight, yet this damage is paid for in car tax through a gigantic cross-subsidy from private individuals to industry. Knowing that it is ultimately because of cheap road transport and commercial profit that we may have to sacrifice the farm and our life as we know it and want it, it was hard to hear the Irish Business and Employers Confederation's condemnation of greedy farmers standing in the way of progress by trying to cash in on compulsory purchase orders.
IBEC grew out of the Confederation of Irish Industry, whose former director general, Liam Connellan, is now chairman of the NRA. Perhaps he and the other urban decision-makers are so focused on finance, to the exclusion of other considerations, that they are quite able to imagine that the issue for farmers is the money they are going to make out of this.
Perhaps they can't see the point the Irish Farmers' Association is making when it asks for the nature of a farmer's sacrifice to be taken properly into account. The point is to make people think about what they are doing when they take a farmer's land, even in return for money - to make them think twice about taking it at all. A farm can't be relocated like an office because land is not just a collection of facilities; farming skills are not straightforwardly transferable like computer skills. The time spent learning about a farm's character, its soils, its problems and assets, about how to work with those assets and deal with those problems, over years or decades of husbandry, means that the land shapes the farmer as much as he shapes it. Farming experience is priceless and having to start again elsewhere represents an irrevocable loss. We are vilified because we try to point out that our occupation involves an investment not just of money but of care.
Money is the most crude of compensations for such a loss. But those farmers who are forced to give up land are now finding that it is hopeless to try to replace it out of compensation at its agricultural value: why would anyone offer land around Enniscorthy for £4,000 an acre when a mere half acre sold for a development site is already netting 10 times that? Yet unless compensation money is used to replace land, the farmer is taxed on it as if he had been a willing seller. In one last tacit insult, the farmer is himself paying another hidden cross-subsidy to those who have taken his land. When a house is built, the cost of the land will be 25 to 30 per cent of total expenditure. For a road, the figure is under 10 per cent (and it has been as low as 1 per cent). Road-building is done to tight budgets but fixing the rules to obtain land at artificially low prices makes it an affordable option without official bodies having to face up to its true cost.
The human cost of road projects, even at the early stages, has already been brought home to us all too clearly. Lives all around Enniscorthy are on hold for the foreseeable future and most stressful of all is knowing that we are being played off against others in the same situation as ourselves. The secretive handling of this project has cast us in the role of opposition to the people living on the proposed western routes, turned us into their enemies, when there is nothing we wish for less.
We will probably never know whether our input makes a difference. We are certainly not allowed to know what the precise criteria are in the route selection process and there is a blanket refusal to comment on any aspects of any of the routes. Effectively, by being given to understand that our opinions count and that whoever makes the biggest fuss will be the "winner", we are being made to compete as aggressively and selfishly as possible with our friends and neighbours.
As we are trying to establish our case, we know that they will also be trying to make theirs, for exactly the same reasons - to protect their own area, their own houses, livelihoods and futures. The short-term damage to the extended community is obvious; experience in other towns shows that it might be deep-seated and long-lasting.
The County Council assures us that this secrecy does not mask a hidden agenda, that the aim is to choose the best possible bypass for Enniscorthy. Yet why should we believe that when, on a national and international level, the agendas which count are so clearly different to those deemed fit for popular consumption? Reality television's time has come but reality government - welcoming public interest, encouraging transparency and fostering access - still seems a good way off.
Even our local experience with the road has provided abundant proof that change is needed. The present system does not reconcile divisions, it creates them. Perhaps those who impose their will on us and call this "progress" or "improvement" could take a cue after all from the farmers husbanding their land - that in a democracy the people must shape the government as much as the government shapes the people.
For more details: www.vinegar-hill.com