Madam, - Growing up in Meath, I was always told how we lived on the most fertile land in Europe. What distresses me most about the proposed M3 is blind stupidity of destroying our valuable food-producing land. This road will cut a 100-metre-wide swathe for 47km through the finest land in Europe, removing more food production from the world's declining resources.
As desert creeps north through southern Europe and south through Africa, we must value land as did our ancestors.
Even as the world population edges towards nine billion, the prevailing wisdom is that Irish agriculture is of little account; farmland is now surplus to needs and the plains of Meath are best used for suburban semi-Ds, roads, and (God help us!) golf courses. The peasants of the southern hemisphere can provide our food and our fuel.
The improvement of the M3 in the 1980s and 1990s opened up the heartland of Meath to rapacious suburbanites seeking the Meath dream: big houses, big gardens, big cars and now bigger roads.
The new M3 will further shorten journey times for a while, opening up more of Meath for the destruction of the finest agricultural land in Europe.- Yours, etc,
PAT BARRY,
North Circular Road,
Dublin 7.