Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland

Chapter 1 - Introduction

In 1999 Clare County Council put up signs beside the access roads to my neighbourhood that welcomed motorists to ‘the Burren Protected Landscape’. The message on the signs surprised me because the Burren is not a ‘protected landscape’ in any generally accepted sense of the term. I used to pass one of the signs on my way to work and was able to monitor the landscape change around the sign on a daily basis. Shortly after the sign went up the old dry-stone wall beside it was replaced by a concrete post-and-rail fence. This was part of an EUfunded road improvement scheme being implemented by the council. introduction Chapter 1 2 Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland INTRODUCTION 3 Nearby, over several days, a landowner, with the help of a JCB, razed level a limestone outcrop and its hazel thicket to make way for a brand new field that was topped off with truck-loads of imported soil. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Burren an ugly array of signage, most of it unauthorised, became the backdrop for another ‘welcome’ sign (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). These various bits of new development in the last dozen years are unexceptional in themselves. But they drew my attention because of their proximity to that simple and unequivocal declaration of landscape protection. The contrast between the public message and what was happening around the signs is just one illustration of the unsatisfactory relationship that exists between contemporary Irish society and the places that it inhabits. This book is an examination of that relationship. The book is about both special places like the Burren and the everyday landscape experience. My aim is to give an account of contemporary Irish landscape and to describe and to explain how and why it has changed over the last forty years. These tasks are undertaken in four stages. In this introduction and the next two chapters I consider what landscape is and I outline the distinctive character of the Irish landscape heritage. Chapters 3 and 4 then describe landscape change and conflict over the last four decades, a period of turbulence and transformation that stands out from the decades of relative calm that came before. If there is no doubt about the wealth of our heritage there is equally no doubt about the problematic relationship that exists between Irish society and its heritage. That legacy is explored in the third section of the book under the headings property and commodity; history, memory and dreams; and beauty. In 1994 Fintan O’Toole suggested that ‘Irish society has skipped the evolutionary stage when a society rediscovers the sacred’. Ireland, according to O’Toole, ‘has become a post-modern society in which landscape is viewed only as a commodity’.1 The engagement of contemporary Irish society with the physical world it inhabits is at least as distinctive and striking as the landscape heritage of the island. Having tried to achieve some degree of understanding of that engagement, the final chapters examine specific types of landscape change and the landscape heritage of our generation. The landscape concept Sometimes, beguiled by the apparent simplicity of landscape as a concept, we make the mistake of assuming that when we look at a hill or a lake, family members and neighbours see the same thing and feel the same about it. We assume a shared response that does not exist. Discussions about landscape have the capacity to be thoroughly disconcerting because they can reveal differences Figs 1.1 and 1.2. Road signs erected beside approach roads to the Burren in 1999 and photographed in 2007. They carry an unequivocal message that is belied by landscape changes in their immediate vicinity. An ugly array of signage, most of it unauthorised, forms the backdrop to the sign in the top photograph, while, in the bottom image, soon after the sign was put up, a concrete post-and-rail fence replaced the dry-stone wall that had formed the road boundary. 2 Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland INTRODUCTION 3 Nearby, over several days, a landowner, with the help of a JCB, razed level a limestone outcrop and its hazel thicket to make way for a brand new field that was topped off with truck-loads of imported soil. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Burren an ugly array of signage, most of it unauthorised, became the backdrop...