Mary O'Malley is an award-winning poet, born and living in Ireland.
Poet's Corner
Galway County Council featured in a recent headline (here) in ‘The Connaught Tribune’. They star regularly in the papers and on the radio but they do not always shine. The story is often about roads they haven’t built, houses they are aghast to hear someone expects them to provide – talk like that is greeted with shouts of ‘No money, no money’ or a steely silence. The other things they don’t do are collect rubbish, and fix the roads some other council already built in an era when it was thought normal to give country people somewhere to drive their cars without the risk of drowning in large potholes.
This headline, however, was about something the Council actually did. In 1998, they took action on the state of the roads and bought a corner. In Loughrea. I didn’t know you could buy, or more to the point, sell corners so I read on. Coco, as they cutely style themselves in their email address, paid 660,124 euro for a corner in Loughrea, a very small one, one tenth of an acre.
It seemed a bit dear to me for such a small corner. In Loughrea. And who regulates the size of corners? There must be a system, which must be costing us at least a million a month. Maybe the Property Tax goes to fund it. A few years ago, I rang the woman in the Coco’s office to ask, out of idle curiosity, if it would be spent locally. ‘That’s what we thought,’ she said. 'But it all has to go to Dublin’.
I said I supposed they told us they’d give it back.‘You know now yourself,’ she said. I did. I should have known better than to ask but sometimes, a kind of persistent innocence keeps breaking through.
Back to the corner. The headline is at least eight years after the sale. I’m no accountant, but surely someone noticed it before now? Maybe because of the 124 euro, it slipped by the accountants as petty cash. I heard that the taxman is suspicious of nicely rounded figures, so maybe they’d have noticed the figure if it was 660,000 euro and no cents. My figures are never rounded. They refuse to add up and who knows where money goes, but even I would notice a missing 660,000 euro. Or 660. Just as well it wasn’t 666,000 or things could have been a lot worse.
For whatever reason, the story broke in January. There is a picture of the corner to go with it, and as corners go, it’s nice. Colourful with several murals of what look like happy children and youngsters playing hurling and football. There is an improbably blue lake, and a religious scene of what might be an angel, or a saint, or even the Lord himself. Which might have been commissioned by the person who flogged Fitzy’s corner to Coco, in gratitude. A present-day version of promise of publication for petitions granted. Maybe Loughrea had just been through a heatwave and sprouted a lagoon. This is all surmise – it could be that there was an apparition there, and that might up the price of corners.
Why did they buy it, you’ll be wondering. To widen a roundabout. The one in the photo is small, the sort you drive over if there’s no-one coming and you’re not overly law abiding, which I am. But some of you would drive over it if there was no guard in sight to give you penalty points, which there won’t be because the gardai are shortstaffed and have crime waves to deal with. Rural Ireland is awash with drugs and burglary and murder. I wouldn’t go anywhere near it if I were you.
Anyway, there is a clear photo of this roundabout the council wanted to widen. Smack in front of the corner. And haven’t.
Why not? The ways of county councils are as mysterious and elusive as the god particle, which has replaced God in phrases like ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ They haven’t widened the roundabout because they didn’t get the go-ahead. From the powers-that-be. In planning. Which you might think would be one of their own departments. They could, if their website is accurate, email their own planning people at coco.ie.
Maybe they did. Maybe there was a backlog. Or a breakdown. I.T. problems? You couldn’t expect someone to walk down the corridor and shout 'Tommy, is there any chance you’d refuse us planning on that corner we’re thinking of buying?' That is so last century.
Now they are left with ‘the most expensive corner in Ireland.’ Why didn’t they get the go-ahead? Why didn’t they ask first, buy later? What happened to ‘buyer beware?’ Why is the Universe not expanding as slowly as we thought? Ask Coco.
January is a lean month.
I get advice. Make two columns, one listing assets, the other liabilities. There is one very long column, and one empty.
I haven’t got an asset. I tell him.
‘What about your house?’ That’s the bank’s asset and anyway, it’s my home. Then it dawns on me.
I write ‘Corners’ in column one.
I have corners. Four, at least, but if I subdivide, there might be no end to the number of corners. There’s no law that says a corner has to be a tenth of an acre, after all. Nor does there have to be roundabout widening involved.
So I am thinking of going into business for the first time in my life. I could ‘corner the corner market.'
It’s exactly the sort of thing that could catch on. There must be a lot of County Councils, at least twenty-five, and the way things are looking in the North, maybe anything up to thirty-two, all crying out for corners. Once they get wind of it, they’ll be flocking to buy.
I am applying for a grant for a feasibility study, with a market research company. Not the one Coco used.
I didn’t want to be purely commercial so I looked for a line of poetry to end my application on, give it a bit of cultural heft. That always helps with the funding, I’m told. First I came across ‘Death is nothing at All’, which has the line ‘just waiting around the corner’ Not the best, considering the state of the roads.
Then I remembered Wendy Cope’s response to an advertisement in The Times by the Engineering Council of Britain asking why there isn’t an ‘Engineer’s Corner’ in Westminster Abbey.
We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints – /That’s why so many poets end up rich, /While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets/…
Watch this space.
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Mary's eighth collection of poems, Playing the Octopus, was published by Carcanet Press in August 2016 and can be found here.
