Fixed links and the engagement of islandness: reviewing the impact of the Confederation Bridge.(Author abstract)

Introduction: A Contentious Affair

Valentia is a small island off County Kerry, on the southwest coast of Ireland. A recent count for the island's permanent population is around 650. A ferry operates daily from 1 April to 30 September. However, should you visit outside this period, there is a bridge (the longest opening span bridge in Ireland). One may thus be pleased to note that all-season access to/from Valentia is available. Yet, bridge technology can also arouse passionate responses:

 
   There are some who have swapped their birthright 
   for a stretch of tar. 
   A bridge that will allow their cars 
   to link with roads 
   that lace mainlanders together, 
   permitting islands to become 
   like a landlocked place. 
   Surrendering their separateness 
   to loop with these larger shores, 
   becoming both part 
   and prisoners of the whole. 
 
   Bridge to Valentia, 
   by Donald S. Murray (Murray 2003) 

A bridge, a stretch of tar, is a contentious subject, especially for islands and islanders. Murray (2003) does not mince his words: the convenience of the bridge is obtained at too high a price, since it irrevocably transforms otherwise whole islands into mere parts, fractions of mainlands. Thus, the island not only loses its geographically, historically and culturally defining islandness; it also becomes a small and insignificant appendage of, and therefore hostage to, a much larger whole, for which the island is but a nondescript peninsula or cul-de-sac. The technology of the automobile conspires with that of the bridge in transforming local identities, and in privileging mobility above place. The outcome is one other example of 'space-time compression' (Harvey 1990, after Janelle 1969); 'the end of geography' (Virilio 1997, 17) and of a move towards a 'zero-friction society' (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003, 2).

This article seeks to deconstruct the concept of the bridge as more than just a value-free symbol of inexorable technological progress, and uses islands as the reference point to flesh out such an argument. Bridges impact on the subtle balance between the characteristic 'local-global' nature of an island identity; such an impact is multi-faceted, complex and case-specific.

Separated or Apart?

Social scientist Georg Simmel (1994, 10) observed that a human being is 'a connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating'. In connecting two objects, we simultaneously acknowledge and underscore what separates them; in separating two objects, we underline their connectedness. Thus, as Simmel argued, in the act of bridging two items, we actually underline their distinctiveness. Insularity and connectedness are but two sides of the same coin, their meanings forever entangled (Gillis 2004, 147).