Roads: ‘we must have motorways’-ireland, the highway and modernity

The Irish motorway typifies the power of wishes, particularly the enduring power of the wishes embedded in modernisation, a project which was subdued in Ireland during the 1980s, but reanimated and reconfigured through the fatal economic boom of the Celtic Tiger. Walter Benjamin grasped how wishing had a distinct spatiality. Wishing, he suggested, had an intimate connection to distance: ‘In folk symbolism, distance in space can take the place of distance in time, that is why the shooting star, which plunges into infinite space, has become the symbol of a fulfilled wish’ (Benjamin 1985: 179). If we invert this statement, but stay with the question of wishing, we can also say that, in modernity, space can be exchanged for time, as a symbol of a wish long withheld, and as an artefact that allows us to dwell in time we may have once have thought of as lost. The production of space can then be about fulfilment. Architecture can be about a wish. When in February 1974, Charles Haughey-later one of Ireland’s most controversial Taoisigh (Prime Ministers)-declared in parliament ‘We must have motorways … we must have motorways’, it seems that what he was really wishing for was modernity. As with many of his contemporaries enveloped in the fever of modernization, Haughey saw infrastructure as essential to connect the country, to develop the economy, but also in his case, as an opportunity to display judicious care of the landscape so that ‘… in the construction of the motorways the general beauty, attractiveness and amenities of the countryside should be preserved to the greatest possible extent’ (Haughey 1974). It took almost 35 years for the systems first considered in the Road and Motorway Act of 1974 to be finally fulfilled, generations after most Western European countries had finished their motorway network. The first plans in Ireland, for Dublin and Cork, were largely rejected in the early 1970s. These would have seen highways over canals, the destruction of neighbourhoods and flyovers juxtaposed against elegant nineteenth-century church spires. The period that followed was characterised by an oil-crisis, the collapse of the Irish economy in the 1980s and a crisis in Modernism, in which the motorway lost its progressive allure as the great infrastructural solution to urban mobility. By 1973, The Sunday Independent was worrying that in the context of an oil crisis would we ‘not be left with superb, unused triple-lane highways cutting swathes through our countryside and huge slices out of our public purse’ (Anon. 1973).