The Meeting About the Turbine

They'd hired the hall for seven, and by ten to there wasn't a chair left and Mary Coyne had brought her own from the car. I'll set it out plainly. I have forty acres of hill that's good for nothing but sheep and views, and a company from Galway wants to put two turbines on it, and they'll pay me more a year for that than the sheep have made in a decade. My son says take it. My wife says take it. The sheep have no opinion. I'd said I'd hear the meeting first, because it's not just my hill, it's everyone's view of my hill, and that's a different thing in a townland this size. The company sent a young woman with a laptop and a fella in a fleece. They had slides. Noise levels, shadow flicker, the community benefit fund. The young woman was very good and I could see the room deciding not to like her for it. First up was Declan Ruane, who is against everything on principle and was against this on several. Property values, birds, the road being wrecked by the lorries. He had a point about the road. Then Sinead, who runs the Airbnb up the far end, said the views were the reason people came and she wasn't having 150 metres of white pole in every photograph, and she wasn't wrong either. Then Father Tom, who I had not expected to speak, stood up and said his sister in Donegal had two turbines on the family land and the money had kept the farm going and he thought we ought to be careful about what we were protecting and who for. Then it went the way these things go for an hour. Somebody's cousin had one and it hummed. Somebody else's cousin had one and you'd never know. The fella in the fleece said "I hear you" eleven times, I counted. Around half eight Mary Coyne stood up. Mary is eighty-one and taught most of the room to read. "I'll say one thing," she said. "I've lived under that hill my whole life. My father cut turf on it. It's the loveliest thing I know. And the summer before last I had to sit in the church for three days because it was the only building in the parish with thick enough walls to keep the heat out, and I'm not doing that again, and I don't think we get to have the hill the way it was and the weather the way it was both. I think we choose."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Declan said something about the road again, and the spell broke, but it had been there. I said nothing the whole night. I'm not a talker. At the end the young woman came over and asked, very polite, had I any questions, and I said I'd let her know. Walking home, my wife said, "Well?" "Mary Coyne," I said. "I know." The thing nobody said, because it's the thing nobody says, is that the turbines don't fix anything for us. Not directly. The power goes into the grid and the grid goes wherever it goes. What they fix, if they fix anything, is some small piece of the thing that's making Mary sit in the church. That's a hard sell in a parish hall. It's a hard sell to me, and I'm the one with the field. I rang the young woman on the Monday. I'm not going to say what I told her. I'll tell you this much: I was up on the hill on the Sunday, with the sheep and the wind, and it was blowing hard enough to lean into, the way it always does up there, and I stood there a while thinking about how much of that goes past every day, doing nothing.