Defending the texture that gives a place its character

ANOTHER LIFE:THE CHRISTMAS journey home across Ireland at the end of next week will pass through much wreckage from the tiger years.

At one settlement after another the brave glitter of fairy lights and the neon reindeer prancing up the walls will be flanked by pools of untenanted darkness. Along country roads and at the coast, redundant bungalows will be those with no Christmas Eve candle or tinsel tree glowing in the window.

Would things have turned out differently with an “integrated national landscape strategy” (as advocated by Terry O’Regan’s Landscape Alliance for decades)? The Heritage Council thinks it would. Landscape is not just countryside, pretty or plain, but the whole history and texture of things that give a place its character.

“When that character is lost,” writes the council’s geographer chairman, Conor Newman, “the people who belong to it lose their sense of place, and the glue that holds communities together becomes unstuck.”

Thus, in its new manifesto, Proposals for Ireland's Landscapes, the Heritage Council connects with much that brings people home at Christmas. It also speaks to an appetite for local action independent of government and outworn party politics – the action of "civil society", as it is termed.

In towns and villages across Ireland both themes warrant downloading this document (at heritagecouncil.ie) for browsing in the meditative days before New Year.

The Heritage Council (one of Charles Haughey’s more redeeming ideas) is funded through the Department of the Environment. From the smallest of its grants to local projects and craftsmen to its deployment of county heritage officers and its national policy papers, it has been a powerfully improving force in Irish society, along with its obvious benefits to environment and tourism.

The latest cut of almost 50 per cent in its funding, coming on top of 30 per cent last year, seems quite as disproportionate as the council’s chief executive, Michael Starrett, has protested. It also undermines his proposal for a Landscape Observatory, housed within its Kilkenny headquarters, to champion the workings of a new Landscape Act.

Since Ireland belatedly signed the European Landscape Convention in 2002, the council has been lobbying for a new planning approach that pulls together all the facets of landscape management – economic, social, environmental – now scattered across multiple departments and agencies. It wants a joined-up oversight of all the major land-use decisions, informed not least by the “spiritual and aesthetic values” of landscape.

Also new, but in the spirit of the European Convention, is its stress on community involvement and “ownership” of place – getting agreement on what actions people want and then enabling them to carry them through under the framework and charters of a Landscape Act.

Our dealings with landscape up to now have done things the other way around: designation first (as special area of conservation, or whatever) and sorting out the conflicts afterwards. This may have seemed necessary in the early years of the EU’s habitats directive, when Ireland as a whole needed persuading of the value of nature and landscape conservation. It is hard to imagine much spontaneous local agreement, even now, on the foraging needs of hen harriers or the conservation of snails.

But decades of popular enlightenment, not least through television, have won a more informed and receptive rural public. Giving nature its due for “ecosystem services” to human existence has helped its official image no end.

In its new document the Heritage Council can point to the successful involvement of farmers in programmes for developing sustainable landscapes in the Burren, Aran Islands and other western areas of “high nature value farming”.

Its own educational outreach has given 100,000 schoolchildren some idea of what “heritage” means in their local landscapes. And its encouragement of community projects such as those of Bere Island, Co Cork, and the Wicklow uplands, its sponsorship of village design and studies such as those for the Shannon corridor have already laid much of the ground for local civil and NGO initiatives.

The new budget cuts, however, mean that these will have to depend more than ever on voluntary and amateur effort.

Whatever we are left with, the end of the building bubble has saved many Irish landscapes from a terminal fragmentation. A Green Minister for the Environment has at least changed the planning acts to include a more enlightened definition of landscape and to give scope for its management in regional and local plans. He will not be returning to his desk after the Government changes, and his department has no guarantee of a successor with anything like his worldview.

What can one do except hope for the best and wish everyone at least a happy Christmas?

Eye on nature

On the brae down from my house I saw a robin administer the final murderous blow to one of its own as it lay on the snow. I knew robins were aggressive and territorial but had never witnessed this.Stephen Colton, Dromore, Co Tyrone

I admired the goldfinches on one of my feeders as they faced off, with beaks wide open, a sparrowhawk that pays an all too frequent visit to the feeders.Robert Hill, Faithlegg, Co Waterford

On December 5th we had about 50 redwings feeding on holly berries. Later in the day we had about the same number of fieldfares. In late October, on a day we called the Day of the Thrushes, about 100 fieldfares descended on our ash tree to devour the berries.Lynda and Iain Cunningham, Maam Valley, Co Galway

They were immigrants from Britain and the Continent.

How do I combat the menace of flocks of starlings descending on my bird feeders?Justin Doyle, Virginia, Co Cavan

Remove perches from the feeders and hang them away from nearby perches.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address