Whilst I was away in China my review of Brendan McGrath's book, Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland appeared in the
Two of the key attractions for visitors to Ireland
are its landscape and people. In survey after survey, tourists
positively mention the beauty of the Irish countryside. Such praise is
forthcoming in spite of the rapid and extensive developments that have
occurred in rural Ireland over the past 40 years, including extensive
one-off house building, sprawling suburbanisation, and the expansion of
infrastructures such as motorways, electricity pylons, wind farms, and
telephone masts.
It seems, however, that whilst
visitors appreciate the landscapes of Ireland, the Irish hold a more
ambivalent relationship, one that prioritises property and individual
rights rather than conservation, heritage and the common good.
This
is the principal argument of Brendan McGrath in Landscape and Society
in Contemporary Ireland. The Irish, he contends, are often ill at ease
in the places they inhabit, mostly viewing land as a commodity and
resource rather than an amenity that needs to be tended and carefully
planned and managed.
The consequence has been little consensus at
both local and national scales concerning how development should occur,
plenty of contestation over particular attempts to alter landscapes
through construction activity, and little in the way of planning reform
or landscape designations that would protect landscapes from negative
change.
Through 11 short chapters McGrath provides
an overview of how the Irish understand the landscapes they inhabit
using a number of case examples that are richly supplemented with
photographs, maps and plans. The argument developed contends that the
relationship between people and the land is shaped principally by
culture, nature, political economy and aesthetics, which have a
particular configuration in the Irish case given its colonial past,
localist politics, and weak regulation.
McGrath
contends that whilst clientelism is a feature of Irish planning it is
often not needed in practice as local authorities share the
non-utilitarian position of local people and facilitate planning
applications that run counter to national policy and international good
practice. This is aided by weakly applied and contradictory planning
policies across scales – local, county, regional, national, European.
Moreover,
he notes, that the Irish government’s commitment to landscape
protection rarely and barely extends beyond the aspirational and
collapses at the first sign of opposition from local landowners worried
about the loss of possible future development potential.
In
other words, there is a gulf between planning theory and practice and
an absence of working consensus across different stakeholders that
enables ad hoc individualism at the expense of the common good.
Although there is a balance in the coverage, with McGrath setting out
the positions of different constituents, it is clear that his vision for
housing and property development is one of concentrated urban
development in the towns and cities, with a containment of low density
suburbanisation, and nucleated villages in rural areas with limitations
on one-off housing.
In both cases there is an
appeal to sustainability, in terms of travel patterns and service and
utility provision, but most particularly to landscape conservation and
protecting habitats and cultural and landscape heritage. This is
underpinned by a strong sense of visual aesthetics and the notion that
“physical beauty enriches our lives.”
It’s most definitely a planner’s and
conservationist’s view of how land and landscape should be managed,
forwarding an approach that is common across Europe and elsewhere. It is
one that most Irish planners will be sympathetic to. However, given the
widespread distrust and subversion of planning by politicians and the
general population, it is a view that will not find favour amongst many
stakeholders.
Aware of such opposition to his
standpoint, McGrath’s suggestion for gaining consensus is a
participatory approach wherein the local community is more actively
engaged in planning and managing the landscape. For example, he suggests
that protected areas need to be run by, with and for local people, and
have both social and economic objectives as well as conservation, rather
than be directed at a distance by government agencies in Dublin or
Brussels.
For all of its positive qualities, the book does have two shortcomings.
First, the analysis is overly descriptive
and lacks depth of argument. This is perhaps to be expected. It is a
book aimed at a general, interested audience rather than a contribution
to academic debates. Nevertheless, the account would have benefitted
from more explanation and from an engagement with more normative
questions about how the relationship between Irish society and landscape
should be formulated.
Second, McGrath’s notion of
landscape limited in scope and the title should have the word “Rural”
at its start, given it barely discusses urban landscapes. Indeed, with
the exception of a couple paragraphs about suburbanisation and the
management of development on Howth peninsula, the towns and cities of
Ireland are entirely absent from the analysis. Even villages barely get a
mention.
The urban in Ireland is apparently
devoid of landscapes worthy of discussion despite its inherent
landscaping, architectural design and cultural heritage. For McGrath
landscape is synonymous with countryside and, more specifically,
romanticised, scenic vistas of mountains, bogs, lakes and coastline
rather than agricultural land or Big House estates. Nearly all his
examples are drawn from the Western seaboard stretching from Kerry to
Donegal and refer to locales acknowledged to be areas of natural beauty.
Nonetheless, the book provides an interesting
and engaging account of the relationship between landscape and society
in contemporary Ireland and raises important questions about the nature
of this association.
Given the piecemeal,
wasteful and often damaging developments of the Celtic Tiger era and the
on-going competing demands on Ireland’s landscapes it is clear that we
need a full and frank debate about how land is managed. McGrath’s book
provides a solid, accessible foundation to inform such a debate.
