Bringing the sea inside - and keeping it there

THE town aquarium I grew up with was already three quarters of a century old. Sunk deep into the ground on Brighton's sea front in 1872, it celebrated the Victorian fascination with the wonders of natural science and was itself a sort of wonder, like a hushed and twilit Gothic cathedral with windows into the ocean.

Its biggest tank was 100 feet long and held 110,000 gallons enough for dolphins, or even a small, sad whale, long before the circus acts of today's ocean aria.

I think I knew the aquarium in a bad patch, before Cousteau's television films bucked things up for a new generation. The tanks had begun to drip there were puddles and algae spread unchecked across the glass. If you waited long enough, a neurotic lumpfish might nose up to the window, to glare. The caverns were largely a haunt of honeymooners and other lovers of the dark.

The lump fish in Dingle's brand new Oceanworld aquarium looks out on to quite a different scene a light, airy and active interior, with a splashing of machine made waves and a fresh, salty smell. Young guides with name tags are there to answer questions and stop the kids climbing into the open topped tanks. I liked the collection of rays that come to be stroked under the chin (really hoping to be fed).

It has taken an extraordinarily long time for the west coast to get an aquarium this beside one of the most exciting and pristine marine habitats in Europe. Without Fungi to generate enough of the right kind of tourist, even Dingle might have had to wait much longer a life size model of the dolphin at the aquarium's portal acknowledges its patron.,

Even sticking to the species found within Dingle's own horizons, as Oceanworld sensibly does. a successful marine aquarium is a costly, fairly high tech investment with a constant need for expert knowledge.

The sea itself is remarkably stable wind, wave, current and myriad micro organisms help to maintain a water chemistry that scarcely changes from year to year. An aquarium needs quite elaborate systems to create and maintain the same equilibrium faced with sudden changes, sea animals weaken and die.

Some of the most striking of Oceanworld's exhibits are also among its most primitive but hardy and long lived. There's a tank of assorted anemones, glowing and gorgeous as Venetian glass, which with proper care could last for half a century. The octopus, too, could be good for decades, if allowed to retain its equanimity "No flash photographs" says the sign, in deference to a nocturnal creature that shuns bright light.

The octopus is a notorious Houdini of aquaria there is always a lid on its tank, and often several bricks on top of that. Such precautions had to be learned in the early days of the Brighton Aquarium. There, a few months after the opening, staff set up an exhibit of young lumpfish. Soon they began to notice the lumpfish disappearing, one per day, and were utterly baffled. Then, one morning, the octopus from next door was found in the tank having failed to climb back in time.

Knowing which species are compatible with others is part of the aquarist's skill. Like the octopus, Dingle's cuttlefish are doomed to solitary confinement the congereels can only be trusted with each other, staring from their separate holes. The liveliest tanks mix fish with coexistent habits and appetites, or predators with things they can't eat (lobsters with sea urchins, for example).

OCEANWORLD'S fish are mostly the familiar species of the fishmonger's slab, but suddenly personable and fascinating with movement in their muscles, light in their eyes. One wonders how many of the children, gazing up raptly through a plastic tunnel, at the school of whiting swimming overhead, actually make the connection with fish fingers.

This aquarium will always need to keep a tank spare for the unexpected and unusual, for the Dingle trawlers have long been a steady source of rare species for Ireland's marine biologists. The Spanish mackerel, blunt head puffer fish, deep sea angler and Greenland halibut are just some that have turned up in trawls and" nets. If the Atlantic warms as predicted or switches off the Gulf Stream altogether strange fishes from the tropics or the far north may be harbingers of change.

If, that is, there are any fish left worth catching. Once, visiting a friend among the Dingle trawler skippers, I would regularly be given for supper one quarter of a brill a delicious steak two inches thick that almost filled the plate. That was 30 years ago.

There were no brill that I saw in Oceanworld, but a glimpse of little turbot burrowing in the sand suggested what I might enjoy from the menu of one of the peninsula's many good restaurants. Turbot, like brill, once grew the length of your arm. The three tiny fillets on my plate would have fitted on the palm of my hand.

THE sortie west on the peninsula to Dingle my first in a year or two gave me a chance cast a vote on the design of the OPW's much debated Blasket Centre, built on an exposed, sloping hillside at Dun Chaoin. Its exterior, blank as a line of cow sheds but without nearly as much character, defies a camouflage of khaki paint. I would clad it with random, fractured slate, hoping that rough facets might make a local cliff of it. Or even, to take another tack, make its surfaces over to Louis le Broquy, for the biggest mural of his life.

The interior, however, contains an absolutely thrilling architectural space a long "nave" flowing down the hill, its stone floor sensually organic and uneven, to frame the distant islands finally in a blast of space and light. This is seriously daring and uplifting stuff. The top lit "side chapels" conspire in an atmosphere of monastic calm and minimalism which must work specially well on a stormy day outside.

A sophisticated study centre, then, not a theme park, with creativity and quality in every internal detail, right through to the door knobs in the loo. It's just a pity about the way it looks outside.