In the eye of the beholder

NEPHIN Mountain, someway north of me in Mayo, has a rough and promising sort of wildness quite different from the fluted and faceted excitement of say, the Twelve Bens or Mweelrea. "A vast, unshapely mound" is the verdict of David Herman, the hill-walker whose new guide to the region I quoted recently.

His comments brought a pained letter from Frank Durkan of Duane Street, New York. Gazing across from his holiday home on the eastern shore of Lough Conn, his images of Nephin are quite different:

"In the early morning the sun touches the mount's crest with a pink light which is almost unnatural in its hue. On a late summer's evening it can wear a cloak of deep purple, or a bonnet of pale mist on its head. On a cloudy day, it appears and disappears in compliance with the vagaries of the winds that rush down the lake from Crossmolina. On a moonlit night it stands silhouetted against the sky like a silent sentinel watching over the hills and valleys. There's more, in an exile's eloquence.

So that's one kind of Irish landscape, an icon constructed from aesthetics and romantic imagination; the new national park now being pieced together around the Nephinbeg range will make much of its remoteness and lonely beauty.

But most people's natural landscape - if they are lucky enough to have one at all - is a piece of lived-in and worked-over countryside where, so often, each new physical change seems to add to the sum of human ugliness.

The idea of a national policy for landscape, managing not only what we think of as grand scenery, but the detail of local environment and design right down to urban streetscape, seems impossibly ambitious - and, inevitably. elitist.

As one speaker asserted at last year's Irish Landscape Forum in UCD: "Basically, landscape planning means that those of good taste, or hopefully of good taste. tell those of bad taste or none what they may or may not do."

Terry O'Regan of Cork, who dreamed up both policy and forum, came at his magnificent obsession in quite a different way. As a landscape contractor, he grew exasperated by being always the last to come on site, expected to grow trees and shrubs in earth pounded down by bulldozers. If only, he brooded, all the people who create and manage landscape, could be given a way of working together, from the start.

With this holistic, even saintly,, vision, he organised the first Landscape Forum virtually single-handed and has published its proceedings (largely from his own pocket) just in time for the Second National Landscape Forum, to be held in UCD on Friday next. The report is an impressive and lively document, with flashes of real radicalism, and well worth the £10 from anyone concerned with the future appearance of this island.

BIG difficulty in planning for beauty is trying not to use the word - instead, devising elaborate tools and systems that don't seem to warrant such subjective judgment.

Ecology has been a great gift to planners, since it side-steps awkward questions of what is beautiful in the landscape or what gives it a special and valuable mood, and concentrates with virtuous science on what ought to be good for nature. The average "impact assessment" is rich in things to measure - number of species, quality of water, number of cars to be parked. Even "landscape character assessment", with its elaborate categories, is well-suited to the engineering mind.

At the first Landscape Forum, Aonghas MacCana of Udaras na Gaeltachta was also inclined to heckle "hyper-educated people with reverence for the analytical process" but not, perhaps, on beauty's behalf. Arriving at planing solutions, he said, "sometimes takes insight and a bit of fire in the belly", and his paper this Friday, "Preserving The Landscape - For Whom?" will undoubtedly connect with the realities of living in the middle of someone else's "scenery".

The politics of Irish landscape have been straightforward and implacable. In a countryside that, fears depopulation far more than's "suburbanisation", every new bungalow is a reassurance. County councillors are there further the welfare of families who vote for them, not some abstract "public good" which expresses the values of people in cities or the taste of middle-class blow-ins.

If a man has land, isn't his son entitled to build on it when he, marries? If people want to live", next to each other along the road, even seven miles out of town isn't that what the car is for?

The politics impinging most directly on county officials have been those of the traditional democratic process. But new forces are arising in the landscape, new community groups with ambition and access to development money.

Friday's event, to be opened by Freda Rountree, chairwoman of the Heritage Council, squeezes a score of topics into the day. The president of the RJAI has a be-spoke thatcher close on his heels there's forestry and windmills, organic farming and landscape art, suburban landscape and access to the wild. And heavier stuff the economic value of landscape and creating rural models for development.

The forum fee is £75, with concessions. Details from Terry O'Regan at Landscape Alliance Ireland, Old Abbey Gardens, Waterfall, Cork: 021-871460. Fax 021-872503.