This book is a thriller. It throws out plots and counter plots. Neptunist versus vulcanist. The Mystery of the Drowning Deer. Michael Viney tempts and teases the reader, before exposing the facts. Or, as with all good thrillers, at least some of them.
The book should be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in our natural and cultural heritage and should also be given to the lay reader as the most complete and readable way in which to understand just why Ireland is Ireland. To anyone familiar with Viney's regular Saturday column in The Irish Times the character of Michael Viney's writing really shows through in this book. With the luxury of more than 300 pages he becomes the true Irish storyteller, capturing the imagination of the reader and making even the driest of subjects seem interesting.
Take radiocarbon dating for example. It is most likely in modern Ireland that if you were reading a book which deals with a diet of salmon and eels, and covers in the same paragraph mouth-watering references to hazelnuts and shells and the fruits of white and yellow water-lilies roasted in embers like sunflower seeds, you would be preparing for the influx of guests you had invited for that dinner party. But not in this case, as this is Viney describing some of the findings of radiocarbon dating from Mesolithic kitchen middens. Now if that doesn't whet your appetite, nothing will.
Maybe you want to know why the giant Irish deer needed phosphorous (and where it got it) or why Ireland has fewer species of plant life than Britain, Denmark or Belgium. Whatever facts you wish to glean Viney weaves his text along the most charming, understandable and believable track. It is almost as pleasant a task to read as to walk in the beloved Co Mayo countryside in which he lives, by his own admission, "in something of a dream".
And if that isn't enough, there is the description of two grown men (who shall remain nameless unless you buy the book) wrestling with antlers on the rooftops in Dublin to try to find out if the giant Irish elk could ever have used its enormous antlers in battle. Answers please on a postcard to . . .
The book is people-oriented. The scientists and academics and ordinary people of Ireland are all portrayed as characters. You get the feeling that you know them all and Viney is very clear throughout the book to link people and nature. The Celts come in for some treatment (are they a race?) and this is truly a natural history of Ireland as a whole. Viney recognises fully that nature is no respecter of political boundaries.
All our flora and fauna, terrestrial and marine, get a fair hearing and the reader cannot fail but make the connection between all of the species and their habitats, placing them in the much wider cultural and natural landscape in which we live and work. It all makes true ecological sense.
The book is truly contemporary and up-to-date, dealing with topical subjects such as overgrazing, bog bursts and the contribution of the EU in "encouraging" us to conserve and protect and manage our natural heritage in a more structured manner. Comparisons may be invidious but Viney pulls no punches and calmly points to the "somewhat more orderly advance of nature conservation in Northern Ireland". He also quotes a young Seán Lemass in 1930 debating the introduction of the Wild Birds Act as saying: "If the economic situation becomes better we can . . . indulge in luxury legislation . . . but we must put the necessities of human beings before wild birds". In view of some recent pronouncements it begs the question of whether attitudes have changed in 73 years.
In fairness, they have, and this book helps us understand how and why. It also leaves us with no doubt that there is much left to do and we should not rest on our laurels, whether indigenous or not.
Michael Starrett is chief executive of the Heritage Council of Ireland. In 2002, he was elected president of the Pan-European Federation of National and Nature ParksNatural History
Michael Starrett
Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History By Michael Viney
Blackstaff Press, 336pp. £20