In praise of Lisa Feeney

One of the regular cants from organs of Official Ireland and politicians alike is that young people don’t get involved in politics. In particular, they don’t vote, but they also tend not to get involved with political parties and great debates. Instead, they text opinions, go any which way on things like the tribunals and get excited quite arbitrarily about random issues.

This is a surprise? That’s what they’ve always done!
But in these quixotic engagements, they often uncover a different truth to Official Ireland’s, and sometimes a deeper meaning.
Let’s take the M3 motorway. There are many reasons why this road should go ahead, the terrors of trying to reach Dublin from points north of Blanchardstown amongst them.
But saying that a motorway is needed is very different to saying that it should be driven through the Tara Skreen valley, a landscape rich in ancient sites that rival Stonehenge and the pyramids. The route chosen suggests that Irish decision-makers, and the National Roads Authority in particular, are the kind of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
It isn’t just that the area has a lot of ancient sites. It also represents a continuum of human history covering almost 5,000 years, unlike Stonehenge, for example, which covers a much shorter time.
It should never have been considered for the motorway. This is certainly the view of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who described the plan as ‘ruthless desecration’ in an interview on BBC Radio Ulster.
In the interview he cites the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916, which summoned people in the name of the dead generations and comments that “if ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times up to historic times up to completely recently, it was Tara.”
In his view, it sends a signal that “the priorities on this island have changed… the strings of the harp are being lashed by the tail of the tiger.”
For Heaney, ‘Tara’ is a word that “conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging, a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal, an ideal of the spirit… that belongs in the place…”
It is for this reason that Tara is on the World Monuments Fund list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites. According to Dr. Jonathan Foyle of the WMF, routing the motorway through the valley ranked with the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Now, isn’t this a political matter?

It is... and for this reason, whatever one might think about her actions, one has to acknowledge the idealism demonstrated by Lisa ‘Squeak’ Feeney, the Kerry-reared Trinity College psychology graduate, who dug herself into a tunnel under Rath Lugh along the track of the intended motorway.
She and others have been digging the tunnel since August – at the bottom it widens into a chamber supported by timber and a car jack. Those of us who have crawled the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam will appreciate the determination and the bravery involved. You might not agree with her and her methods, but you have to hand it to her all the same: to put yourself in the firing line like that, for something you believe in, takes immense courage.
There’s time enough for people to grow old and boring and to misplace the capacity for wild and radical action that’s possible as long as the future stretches before you like an aeon.
But other than old age, when most people will treat you and what you have to say much as the NRA is treating the ancient landscape of Tara, your late teens and twenties are the time when you can be most honest and most direct.
You are licensed to speak, uncompromised by the weight of responsibilities and the need to wheel and deal and live in what the cynics call ‘the real world’ – and you can, therefore, utter and enact one of the purest forms of political truth.
In this regard, one salutes too the statement issued in Spain the other week by Sandra Carrasco, 20 year old daughter of Isaias Carrasco, former socialist town councillor in the Basque town of Mondragón.
She said: “My father was murdered for defending freedom, democracy and his socialist ideas. He was a brave man who was not afraid to show his face. Those who killed him were cowards, cowards who have no balls… I am very proud of my father and those who killed him are bastards. Nothing more. I love him.”
Somehow, when the paragons of Official Ireland lament the lack of political engagement of young people, one doubts they are yearning for this kind of straight talking, any more than they are looking for more of the kind of direct action taken by Lisa Feeney.
But frankly, I’d be more than happy to have our national politics shaken and stirred by voices such as these. Wouldn’t you?