Tryweryn is a name that will will “live in infamy” in the psyche of the Welsh. For the
benefit of the readers from other lands, the name is synonymous in Wales with the heavy-handed autocratic government legislation by Westminster involvingt the destruction of an area of natural beauty in rural Wales to build a reservoir for Liverpool.
This egregious piece of legislation successfully initiated by the city of Liverpool was
met by an intense widespread and cohesive opposition from all parts of Wales and
by all the Welsh MPs of all parties. Despite the most strenuous opposition, the
MacMillan government of the day sanctioned the Bill before them which resulted in
the erection of a dam and the subsequent flooding of 800 acres in the Tryweryn Valley, a pristine countryside near Bala in North Wales.
The village of Capel Celyn with its school were effaced from the map. Seventy
people were displaced and twelve farms and portions of four other farms were expropriated for the development . It was only a matter of time before the thirst of the Liverpudlians would be slaked at the expense of an area of great cultural value to Wales.
This gross insult fanned the resurgence of nationalism and inflicted a grievous wound
in the consciousness of the Welsh people. Graffiti on boulder and overpasses are
still today a painful reminder of those tumultuous times in the mid-sixties when the
entreaties of a fragile nation were ignored by the stroke of a pen of an unsympathetic and dismissive government.
On the rare occasions that a very dry summer visits the area and the water level is low, the remnants of the village stand out grotesquely on the valley floor in mute testimony of a distant government’s flagrant inconsideration of its vulnerable citizens.

Now fast forward to November 1st to Mirabel Airport 40Km north of Montreal, Canada. An Air Transat plane took off for Paris that morning on what is the last scheduled flight from this airport.
In the early seventies the Canadian government of the day expropriated 126 square miles of prime farmland in Quebec , and 6.25 square miles were utilized to build the huge Mirabel airport. In the process, no less than 10,000 people were forced out of their homes!
The airport was opened with a huge fanfare in the late seventies but it soon became evident that it was a complete fiasco as it was vastly underused because of its distance outside metropolitan Montreal. True to the usual behaviour of governments who have erred in their calculations, various Canadian governments have turned a blind eye to the dismal failure of the airport staring them in the face day after day, and now, nearly thirty years later, the closure of the airport is being effected with little fanfare.

These two examples illustrate that insensitive governments can, without any qualms or hesitation, uproot their citizens from their natural environments on the pretext that a fewer number of persons can be sacrificed for the good of a larger number. It boggles the mind that we, the electorate, have given our “here today, gone tomorrow” politicians, the power to disrupt our lives by enforcing permanent inimical decisions on us, and at the same time, insulating themselves from any obligations or recriminations resulting from those decisions.