Roads to Nowhere: Irish Roads Protests

Abstract

Notable environmental protests that invoke the history of colonial dispossession have focused on road construction. Roads protests can be traced to Boudicca’s insurrection against Roman occupation in Britain and have been shaped in Ireland by famine roads—roads that the starving Irish were forced to build in exchange for food. In the twentieth century, roads protests have continued, including John Montague’s 1968 literary protest, “Hymn to the New Omagh Road” and Eddie Lenihan’s protest of the County Clare road to Shannon Airport, whose original path would have required cutting down a fairy tree. More recently, the protest of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skyrne valley involved many prominent writers and musicians.