Countryside council a timely idea

Another Life: The countryside of my East Sussex childhood was of rare and noble quality, from the airy, whale-backed hills of chalk downland to the fertile plain beyond. "Bare sloped," as Kipling wrote, "where chasing shadows skim,/ And through the gaps revealed/ Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim/Blue goodness of the Weald."

In the wake of war, much of the high, springy turf of ancient sheep walks, with its beautiful chalkland flora, had been fenced off and ploughed for cereals, a permanent change producing severe erosion. It has taken 50 years to arrive at firm proposals for a South Downs National Park. But much of my first youthful "walkabout" through Sussex was along sign-posted downland paths and lowland rights-of-way. Even then, access to the countryside was seen as a national good .

It has been an ever-improving process. In 2000, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act provided for a statutory right of access to around 1.25 million hectares of open country in England and Wales: mountain, moor, heath and down and common land. It also gave some real effect, in planning and countryside management, to the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty created more than 30 years before.

The Republic has been wary of beauty, preferring the check-lists of science. It has also shrunk from creating a politically independent agency to champion the conservation of wildlife and the countryside. In the UK, English Nature does this buoyantly, with a £73 million budget from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). It runs the nature reserves, has a busy educational programme and defends right-of-way and conservation areas with statutory teeth. It has the sort of independence that many people, quite mistakenly, once attributed to Dúchas, the Irish Heritage Service. The neat name, the logo on the little blue vans, set up expectations of executive action by a free-standing champion of heritage conservation. But Dúchas was never more than an expert advisory unit within a government department. But when the illusion of its independence persisted in the public mind and its opinions loomed too large in embarrassing planning rows, it was hauled back within the public service. Today, under its battered old hat, National Parks and Wildlife is a muted unit within Martin Cullen's environment department.

In the UK, English Nature has been only one arm of the state's rural conservation programme. The Countryside Agency was set up in 1999, with a £100 million budget from DEFRA and soaring brief "to conserve and enhance England's countryside, spread social and economic opportunity for the people who live there and help everyone, wherever they live and whatever their background, to enjoy the countryside and share in this priceless asset." Since then, however, there has been a lordly Review of Rural Delivery, and this spring seems likely to see English Nature brought together with most of DEFRA's Rural Development Service in a new - and still independent - organisation with biodiversity and wildlife protection at its core.

All this is simply to illustrate the variety of political paths and cultural priorities in conservation of the countryside. A figure that has stuck in my mind, possibly from decades ago, is that a mere 4 per cent of English people have anything directly to do with farming, even if they live rurally. This must make it much easier to legislate for a "national public good" in which nature conservation and public access are not felt as threatening conspiracies.

In his new initiative to secure peaceful access to the countryside, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Eamon O Cuiv, also calls for "recognition of the greater good of society". His proposed Countryside Council, Chomhairle na Tuaithe, will try to reconcile the interests of farmers and walkers in the development of local tourism, and his department will treat the maintenance of agreed and waymarked walks as a rural service.

Mr O Cuiv, who himself lives high in the Connemara hills, is an honourable exponent of the Irish way of doing things. In his last posting, as junior minister to Síle de Valera, his unfolding of the EU's Special Areas of Conservation to groups of deeply suspicious farmers became a marathon of diplomacy.

A Countryside Council has a reassuring ring. Do we also need an "Irish Nature Council" in which the old essence of Dúchas is revived, empowered and given a free voice? Some day in the future, when all the new roads have been driven through the woods and all the wetlands have been safely built over, a newly-settled rural middle class may find it a timely idea.