Unfortunately for Professor Harry Harrison of County Wicklow, he's not to be allowed a breath of fresh air. He'd like more light in his dining room and laundry room, but the powers that be at An Bord Pleanala have denied his request for three more windows installed in his country house. It's the cows, you see.
The professor went to his local county council to get permission, and he no doubt was comfortable with the notion that it was a done deal. The house is there, and all he needed was a bit more light. He paid an architect to draw up plans to pop in some extra windows, a very humdrum sort of business. Who could have guessed that the neighbor's cows would object?
The architect, Vincent Delaney, proposed the installation of strengthened glass, and then he set the sill heights at the equivalent grade level of a gate. Granted, cows have been known to jump over the moon, but in general they're not likely to leap a gate that's just over a meter high. Even if, for some bizarre reason like the sudden appearance of rattlesnakes in the pasture, the cows were to bolt, they'd not be leaping through Professor Harrison's dining room window. Slap a bit of a coating on the windows so they don't look as clear as an escape route from those same snakes, or what have you, and the cows aren't about to crash and injure themselves.
County Wicklow's planning inspector didn't see anything wrong with the new windows, what with the wide space between properties and the odds of a cow bolting into the dining room anyway. Sadly, the council sided with the neighbor on behalf of his livestock, and then An Bord Pleanala sided with the council, and now there's two government bodies that look like complete eejits.
Well done, bureaucrats. The cows of the world thank you for your consideration of their safety.
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