Dear Editor,
A once great eco-social experiment that engendered civic pride, created a natural 'carbon sink' to offset global warming, produced oodles of goodwill towards City Hall and developed a unique 'green corridor' through the heart of our grey urban sprawl is now being threatened by City Council's plans to build a roadway though its heartland.

The proposal to construct a roadway through the Terryland Forest Park that will connect an enlarged Dyke Road to the Quincentennial Bridge fatally undermines the park's core ethos of creating a major unbroken ecological corridor and will result in the forest being permanently reduced to a series of small isolated parks surrounded by roadways that will ultimately kill off its wildlife denizens. Nor will it solve traffic congestion, as it will be just bring cars further along onto an already gridlocked bridge. Furthermore, the possibilities of transforming the Dyke Road into a new major artery for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport will be lost forever.

Only a few years ago, the Terryland Forest Park captured the popular imagination of the whole nation. Here for the first time in Ireland, thousands of citizens of all ages answered the call from local government to plant tens of thousands of trees in an effort to create wonderful urban forest on what was largely sterile land and provide a sanctuary for wildlife and an outdoor leisure facility for the city's population. Up to 120 acres were zoned for the park, much of it saved from the threat of built development and where over time 500,000 native Irish trees would be planted. It was a fascinating inclusive initiative and the once unstoppable march of the concrete jungle was somewhat abated by the creation of this magical green oasis planted and nurtured by the ordinary folk of Galway. As with the almost simultaneous introduction of a pioneering three-bin domestic waste collection system, our city led the way for Ireland to meet its international environmental obligations.

Citizens were asked to claim ownership of what was to be a 'People's Park'.

And so we did, as a litany of giant picnics, outdoor theatre, annual community tree and school children bulb planting days, art workshops and nature walks took place that often attracted thousands of participants. The once foreboding bureaucratic monolith of City Hall took on a more human appeal as politicians and officials got 'down and dirty' digging into the soil alongside their local constituents.

A sense of a shared collective responsibility took root as artists, ecologists, academics, state officials, forestry workers, planners, environmentalists and community activists metamorphosed into a committee of enthusiastic equals that endeavoured to steer the Forest Park towards a bright new green future. Schools started to use its grounds as an 'outdoor classroom'. Plans were drawn up to develop tree nurseries, arboreal natural playgrounds, artificial lakes and canals, an outdoor natural amphitheatre, a forestry educational centre, a training facility for the learning of traditional skills such as drystone-walling and coppicing that would be productively used for the construction and maintenance of the park's own natural boundaries, the use of compost produced from the household brown bins to fertilise the park's flora and the consideration of switching to bio-fuels to power the park's vehicles/equipment.

Nature responded as hares, bats, pheasants, voles, foxes, rabbits, swans and kestrel travelled along the Corrib and in from the countryside to populate a man-made wildlife haven located in close proximity to the city centre. The park truly became a 'green highway' linking the wetlands of the River Corrib near Terryland Castle to the turloughs and farmlands of Ballindooley/Castlegar. It rightly deserved the official epitaph of 'Green Lungs of the City'.

The existence of the roads that separated the different sections of the park was to be overcome by creating linkages, possibly using building rubble to create mounds either side of the roads topped off by eco-bridges. Fantastic!