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By John Burns & Paul Colgan
 Four men held an important meeting in a field in Co Roscommon last June. Three of them were environmental campaigners, the fourth was a consultant employed by President Mary McAleese. They were standing on a site where the president hopes to build her retirement home. The consultant was attempting to persuade the environmentalists of the merits of the project.
He did not succeed. Campaigners will almost certainly lodge an objection against the president's house with An Bord Pleanala.
They have already thwarted the project once. Earlier this year the appeals board upheld an objection by An Taisce against planning permission for the proposed two-storey house overlooking Lough Eidin. The board said the site chosen for the president's retirement home was in "a remote, elevated and exposed rural area of high visual amenity in close proximity to the shore". The house and its jetty would be "visually obtrusive" and "would constitute an unacceptable risk of pollution to the lake and would be prejudicial to public health".
The environmentalists' victory was an embarrassing setback for the president and her family. In a bid to avoid a repeat, McAleese's developers contacted An Taisce and Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) in an attempt to win their acceptance for a second planning application. And so it was that Bernard McHugh, of McHugh Consultants, met Tony Lowes and Peter Sweetman of FIE and An Taisce's Ian Lumley on the site last June, just before the plans were resubmitted.
"The president's developers were looking for a deal with us. They asked us what we wanted and what would happen," said Lowes. "Roscommon county council is likely to give permission for the house in a couple of weeks and by the end of September we have to decide what to do."
It seems certain that fresh objections will be lodged. "Friends of the Irish Environment believes this area should not be built on," Lowes confirmed. "It is unspoilt. The lough is worth saving and we can save it. I think it is hard to see how you can justify building in this area."
An Taisce, the Irish national trust, has also said that while it is reluctant to interfere with the long-term planning of as respected a figure as the president, it opposes "one-off developments where no compelling social need has been established and where there is no plan to engage in farming".
Had a tidal wave from Lough Eidin washed over President McAleese's site last June, three of Ireland's most active environmentalists would have been washed away and Irish developers and county councils might have been tempted to raise a toast. Because between them Lowes, Lumley and Sweetman have delayed or stopped many more grand designs than McAleese's.
WHILE developers and officials regard them as a nuisance, to others they are heroes who have curbed the worst excesses of unscrupulous builders. Either way, they are now more likely to be consulted and accommodated than dismissed as cranks or sandal-wearing obsessives.
It's surprising how many of them are foreigners. Lowes, Ireland's most active environmental campaigner, was born in New York, educated in America and Switzerland, and now lives in Cork. In 1997 he founded FIE with Sara Dillon, another American and a lecturer in environmental law at University College Dublin. Karin Dubsky, another prominent campaigner, was born in Germany, while Robert Guillemot, who held up the redevelopment of Ballymun, is from Brittany.
Did it need foreigners to open Irish people's eyes to the devastation being wreaked by haphazard planning and opportunist development?
Lowes said: "Sara Dillon and I have talked about this. As students we were educated in civics and citizens' rights. We were trained in public speaking and learnt the techniques of meetings. Perhaps we had skills that helped us to highlight environmental issues.
"Some Irish people are afraid to speak out. People are even afraid in some Irish rural towns to say they are members of An Taisce. Their livelihoods would be gone. That's sad."
Lowes knows how hazardous environmental campaigning can be. He received in the post the shell casing of a high-velocity rifle bullet after he twice objected to plans for a television mast in his area. A man with a Northern Ireland accent phoned the next day to make sure he had got the message. FIE now has a policy that members do not take cases in their own areas.
Communities can resent it when "blow-ins" like Lowes campaign against something they want, such as TV masts. What is even more galling is when they team up with Eurocrats to thwart projects. Europe has indeed been a useful ally for these campaigners - its thickets of regulations provide them with endless legalities with which to trip up slipshod designs.
That was how Lowes won his first big environmental victory. Upset by the routing of the Kildare bypass through the delicate ecosystem of Pollardstown fen, he complained to the European commission. "I wrote a five-page letter that ended up costing the Irish government £25m," he said. "That was £5m per page."
Europe's decision was that part of the road should be wrapped in plastic to protect the fen. Was the costly delay really worth that piece of plastic? "Yes, we learnt about the importance of aquifers and that you can't put a road through them," said Lowes. "You can't put a price tag on what we've learnt."
Lowes and Europe again teamed up successfully against a Greg Norman
designed £12.5m golf course at Doonbeg, Co Clare. The European commission suspended grants for the project after a complaint from FIE, and only released the funds after the environmental group and the golf course developers thrashed out a deal.
Doonbeg will go down in history as a battle to protect a rare, 2mm-long narrow-mouthed whorl snail, Vertigo
Angustior, but Lowes' real mission was to protect rare sand dunes on the site. The idea that opposing the Kildare bypass was just to protect another snail, Angistora
Vertiego, was black propaganda by the government, Lowes says.
"We are not looking to stop infrastructural projects over minor things. The point is that if there is a rare animal on a site, that means it is a valuable habitat, and that is what we try to protect," the campaigner said.
Environmentalists realised Europe could be of use to them in the late 1980s, Lumley recalls. An Taisce was campaigning against the burning of bituminous coal, which was shrouding Dublin every winter in a pall of smog, packing out casualty departments with wheezing bronchitis and asthma sufferers. The coal industry and politicians wrung their hands and said nothing could be done. But then the European commission introduced emission limits and the Irish government had to obey them. The smoky coal was banned.
"That was the first big case where European intervention was crucial," said Lumley.
A full-time officer with An Taisce, he refuses to apologise for the long delays environmental protesters often cause to infrastructural projects such as roads and monuments. "Such delays are caused by the inadequacy of the applications, not by us expressing our concerns," he said.
An Taisce expresses these concerns in 3,000 planning submissions each year and its focus is currently on challenging the haphazard way that the housing boom is being managed. "Many of the 50,000 houses being built annually are car-dependent, contributing to sprawl, in the wrong location and badly designed. Thirteen thousand of them have septic tanks and that's an environmental time bomb," Lumley said.
"Ireland has created a very unattractive car-based suburban society which has some attractions in the short term but is going to give us a long legacy of traffic congestion and expensive servicing costs."
Given that the trust is so critical of one-off houses being built throughout rural Ireland, its criticism last week of a plan to extend the boundary of Kenmare, Co Kerry, was all the more surprising. What could be more logical than doubling the size of the town instead of the desecration of the Kerry countryside with a further bungalow blitz?
Lumley defends An Taisce's stance - saying the proposal to extend Kenmare is out of proportion and scale - but the trust's seemingly inconsistent position will give more ammunition to critics who charge that it only takes up causes that are guaranteed media attention. Just like its opposition to the president's Roscommon house.
While environmental campaigns say they are democratic organisations, the feeling in development circles is that just a few activists, such as Lumley and Lowes, pick the targets and call the shots. Sweetman, another prominent activist, admits he is a highly individualistic performer. His Waste Action Group, the first to make waste disposal a national issue, had only five members.
"My main concerns are roads, pig units, dumps and quarries, and I got into all four of these issues as a Nimby [not in my back yarder]," he said. "I was the first person to be cut off by a road - the Kill bypass - and then a dump was built on my doorstep. I'm now a professional Nimby and the whole of Ireland is my backyard."
What drives him to devote most of his life to his causes? "You have to totally believe in what you're doing," he said, "but a little success goes a long way."
Sweetman, a member of FIE, likes to use a combination of European regulations, planning objections and legal challenges when he takes on a project. "You throw the kitchen sink at it in the hope that something sticks," he said. "It's not a level playing field. They have more resources and the state is always right until you can prove it wrong."
THEY never rest. While Lumley was on Morning Ireland on RTE Radio last week giving a learned dissertation on planning problems in Meath, Lowes was getting column inches by taking on the Wicklow county council development plan and its removal of a prohibition on guesthouses and hotels in landscape zones.
Sweetman was busy too. "I'm in Tuam, Co Galway," said the Tipperary-based activist late on Friday evening. "I'm working on an objection to a waste transfer station at the back of a food factory. I have to get information to put in a planning objection. It must be in by 5pm on Monday."
You can bet it will be.
The Sunday Times
Page 14
Focus
Sunday 19th August 2001
www.sunday-times.com
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