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Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland |
May 6, 2015 |
| Reviewer:
Catherine Nash, Geographical Reviews from UK
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This is a timely and important book that should generate much debate and prompt significant shifts in understanding, policy, and practice with regard to landscape conservation in Ireland. Written from the perspective of a planning professional who has engaged practically and reflectively with the transformation of Irish landscapes over the last decades, this book aims at a wide audience, identifies the effects and underlying causes of a relative lack of a collective vision of natural landscapes as shared national heritage deserving of protection in Ireland, and advocates a new model of landscape planning, management, and conservation. This is not to suggest that there are not people, working individually and in groups, who care deeply about specific places or more widely about natural landscapes in Ireland. Brendan McGarth makes this clear from the many examples of local activism in conflict with local developments in this book. Instead, this is a diagnosis of a more prevalent attitude based on the evidence of his own professional experience and knowledge, on the clear empirical evidence of the comparative absence of the sorts of state and civic commitment to landscape conservation practice and policy found in other European countries, and on his reading of the effects of the particular pattern of Irish nation building and state formation on attitudes to land, landownership, and landscape.
Though it is not articulated explicitly as such, a thought-provoking account of a postcolonial landscape problematic in Ireland runs through this book, underpinning what might appear to be contradictory strands in what people value about and what people do to landscape in Ireland. It helps make sense of the apparent contradictions of the deep, symbolic weight of rural landscapes in Irish national identity, but the degree to which, as social surveys testify, natural landscapes are not recognised as a form of national heritage in contrast to archaeological artefacts, literature, or music for example, and thus worthy of protection. It underlies the deeply negative associations of the houses and landscapes of colonial landownership, yet the appeal of the "big house" for the new economic elite, and the widespread aspiration to live in a newly built "one-off" house in the country that all too often displays an insensitivity to the effects of this dispersed settlement on the locality including ecological and aesthetic effects - the loss of old dry-stone field walls with road improvements and bungalow fences for example - and more widely in terms of the contribution of car dependency and commuting to climate change.
The struggle to negotiate the tension between personal aspirations and the ethics of consumption (of all kinds) is of course not unique to the Irish context. But this book explores a particularly striking combination: the potency of the ideal of a detached home in the countryside fuelled by the poor quality of suburban house design and government disinterest in promoting the regeneration of older city and town housing stock rather than new property development, and the largely implicit but sometime more openly expressed political and cultural antipathy to the idea of landscape protection and planning. This, McGrath argues, drawing effectively on other analysts - geographers, historians, cultural commentators - is not just a tension between the appeals of tradition and modernity, past and future, that runs through advanced consumerism and has had a particular intensity in Ireland given the speed of economic change in the late twentieth century. As he convincingly argues, it reflects the profound significance of a historical narrative of colonial appropriation of land, native dispossession and displacement and the struggle for land reform before independence, and the significance of rural life and landownership in Irish nation building. Comments from politicians and property developers that McGarth weaves through his discussion testify to the degree to which this underpins the strength of feeling that emerges when the symbolic right to build a house in the countryside is challenged by planning or landscape conservation concerns. When one of the largest property developers of the Celtic Tiger period, quoted by McGarth, states that, "It is time the Irish went through the front gate" (p.128) in relation to the housing estate he built in the grounds of an early Georgian mansion, his reference to an idea of anticolonial repossession is clear.
As McGrath shows vividly through his accounts of specific cases and wider knowledge and experience, this anticolonial legacy shapes reactions to any challenge to the "rights" to build a home in the country as a native, ancient tradition as asserted by the Irish Rural Dwellers Association, deep antipathy to the restoration of homes and parklands associated with the Protestant gentry, and the pejorative labelling of those pursuing landscape conservation concerns as colonial relicts, as in the words of one politician who described conservationist as a "consortium of belted earls and their ladies and left-wing intellectuals" (p. 82). This was in 1971 and of its time, but despite much social change since, a postcolonial condition still underlies the lack of support for the model of designated national parks because, McGrath argues, "the national park label is a handicap to any conservation initiative because it implies a slavish imitation of English culture" (p. 196). This is a theme throughout this book that both engages with ideas of landscape and beauty more broadly to frame its focus on themes of landscape change and conflict, and the challenge of developing more equitable and effective landscape conservation approaches.
But equally attentive to these cultural and historical dimensions and the policy and legislative context, McGrath astutely combines this postcolonial diagnosis with an insightful attention to issues of governance: - both the centralised and top-down nature of governance that fuels local resistance to outside intervention especially given a relatively undeveloped civic culture, and the culture of clientelism in which politicians bend rules or intervene in planning decisions for their favored constituents. This has led to a difficult impasse, he argues, in which the planning work of local authorities is undermined by the local power of landowners and developers, supported through informal and official state support for property development, and state interventions, and made even more difficult by the way in which European Union initiatives regarding landscape conservation are "regarded with suspicion at best and at worst as an unwarranted intrusion into the lives of individuals and of local communities" (p. 201). The nature and practice of planning in Ireland, he shows, is caught between conflicting priorities, and shaped by lack of central government conviction and commitment to landscape conservation and local
resistance to external regulation.
However, in keeping with this book's depth and rigor, there is no simple turn to an idea of a grassroots and place-based conservation movement that can break this impasse. Informed by his own experience of the deep conflicts over development that can divide local communities, McGarth advocates a model of landscape protection that replaces a piecemeal, top-down, short-term approach with one that combines social, economic, and conservation objectives, and that is run for and by local people. It replaces an emphasis on protection with restoration and rehabilitation, is integrated into a long-term and geographically comprehensive strategy, and is orientated to local, national, and international concerns. This paradigm is being put into practice in exceptional cases in Ireland as he demonstrates; they are exceptions, but important exemplars for what he argues might be possible more widely.
At its best, this book pays close attention to the specificity of the context under discussion, vividly reinforcing the argument with telling cases and effective photography. It slips a bit from this attentiveness in the brief recourse to more universalising models of landscape appreciation based on spurious speculative evolutionary accounts of early women's and men's approaches to landscape - both unnecessary to the argument of the book and problematic for the models of femininity and masculinity they naturalise. But there are other more suggestive and progressive asides that are worth noting: there is McGrath's challenge to the idea of the cultural authority, depth of belonging, and authenticity of landscape appraisal of the locally rooted. "Connectedness with the surface reality of a place can touch us deeply," (p.113) he writes, arguing against a simple denigration of the nonlocal's relation to place in contrast with those deemed to be indigenous. The trauma of landscape change - a tree felled, a lane widened, old stone steps to a cove concreted over - he argues is not only felt by those long resident. Despite the familiar idea of the once rich intimacy of local knowledge now lost with modernity that is evoked in the book in part through the figure of Seamus Heaney, McGarth's own local homemaking, and his turn to the work of Tim Robinson, point to other models of local belonging: achieved rather than inherited. These are vital in relation to old and new questions of local and national inclusion and for the model of collective commitment to landscape heritage he espouses. Accompanying the anticolonial rejection of landscape conversation as an alien affectation, is the implicit idea that those deemed to also be "alien" arrivals, whether in the distant or recent past, have no natural rights to belong in a place or to love its landscape. McGarth draws on arguments about a deeply collective lack of Irish belonging in the landscape as a product of shared historical trauma, and there are problems with this figuring of a collective psychic wound. However, divisive ideas of differently distributed degrees of belonging in Ireland are both more easily identified and more vital to address. This book suggests ways to pursue entangled questions of shared belonging and shared care for landscape.
This is one effect of the reflexive autobiographical strand that is another highlight of this book. Its brief autobiographical passages suggest a sense of a deep and sustained engagement with the issues, not just professionally, but personally.There is a sense, too, in the book that the author wants to understand rather than just criticise the actions of those who individually or officially replace those dry-stone walls with standardised concrete post fencing or much worse. McGrath eschews a didactic tone, or more acerbic critique, in favour of enlisting more public engagement through his thoughtful approach, convincing diagnosis of the problems, and proposal for a possible way forward. I hope that this book will be widely read and prompt the shifts in approaches that the author advocates, to both repay his efforts and for the sake of landscape in Ireland.
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