Ireland's tourism industry has thrived in recent years on the strength of a carefully cultivated image of a green, pleasant and even misty island on the edge of the Atlantic. Yet with monotonous regularity dismayed visitors write heartfelt letters appealing to us to take firm action to prevent the Irish landscape being ruined.
Horror stories abound about the oceans of litter, the heavily-eroded pilgrim path snaking up Croagh Patrick, the tacky trinket shops intruding into views of the Cliffs of Moher, the traffic congestion in Clifden and Dingle and even the tourists alighting from coaches in the Burren armed with trowels to dig up its rare plants.
Everywhere in the main tourist areas there is evidence of a landscape under pressure as the number of overseas visitors, at five million-plus, outstrips the Republic's population. More generally, there has been a failure on the part of the State to protect many of the environmental assets which are the tourism industry's raw material.
Caravan sites violate the integrity of numerous scenic areas such as Melmore Head, in Co Donegal. There, they even rear up behind its youth hostel, designed by Edwin Lutyens, which is itself a model of how to fit a building into the landscape.
Not surprisingly, environmentalists are far from sanguine about the much-vaunted "benign" impact of tourism. According to Mr Tony Lowes, chairman of An Taisce's natural environment group, the tourism industry seems to be incapable of grasping that it has now become "a problem in itself rather than a solution to other problems." At last May's annual conference of Birdwatch Ireland in Rosslare, Co Wexford, Mr Lowes delivered a broadside against the industry, provocatively titled "Mass Tourism: A Requiem for Wild Ireland", blaming it for causing air and water pollution, soil erosion, depletion of natural resources and destruction of important wildlife habitats.
A coalition of six leading environmental groups, An Taisce, Birdwatch Ireland, Coastwatch, Crann, the Irish Peatland Conservation Council and the Irish Wildlife Trust, has called on the Government to "stop the continuing damage to some of Ireland's prime ecological sites" by implementing special protection measures.
They point out that every one of 800-plus sites proposed for designation as Natural Heritage Areas still lacks statutory protection. And as for the even more important Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), the Government was supposed to submit a full list to the EU Commission by June 1995. Three years later it has yet to do so.
There are also more than 100 designated Special Protection Areas for birds, yet many sites continue to be damaged or threatened. The boundaries of several "protected" sites are even being redrawn to exclude areas earmarked for development, whether it's reclamation, peat extraction, infrastructure or tourist amenity provision. According to the environmentalists, 23 sites of European importance are either already damaged or facing imminent development. They include sand dune systems, uplands, bogs or estuaries in 13 counties: Clare, Cork, Donegal, Dublin, Kerry, Longford, Meath, Offaly, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow. "In most cases, the EU Habitats Directive has been breached, and in others national legislation has not been enforced", the six groups complained. They called for the publication of a long-delayed Bill to update the 1976 Wildlife Act, submission of the list of SACs to Brussels and adoption of a more systematic approach to habitat protection.
Mr Peter Foss, chairman of the Irish Peatland Conservation Council, which has been waging a relentless campaign to preserve what's left of Ireland's bogs, says the Government's lack of action has meant that the protected area designations aren't worth the paper they are printed on. As a result, precious sites are being lost every day.
One of them is Glen Lake in Co Westmeath, where an Office of Public Works drainage scheme did severe damage to an important wintering site for whooper swans, whose numbers are down from 450 to just 70. Now there is not enough water to support a series of tourist-related outdoor activities planned by a community development group.
In Co Galway Mr Tim Robinson, the meticulous map-maker of Folding Landscapes fame, is leading another campaign to save Roundstone Bog, described as "the last bastion of real wilderness in Connemara", from the development of an airstrip on State-owned land at Derrygimlagh, near the site of Marconi's old telegraph station.
At issue is a proposed land swap, whereby the developers headed by a local hotelier, Mr Paul Hughes, would give up the land at Ardagh near Clifden, where they had planned to build an airport seven years ago (it was turned down on amenity and environmental grounds) in exchange for the Derrygimlagh site, which they claim is "degraded."
Environmentalists have also accused the Government of cherry-picking the EU Habitats Directive by wilfully ignoring provisions requiring the rehabilitation of damaged priority sites. They have also condemned the practice of redrawing the boundaries of SACs, in some cases because of pressure to facilitate development. Banna Strand in Co Kerry, where Roger Casement landed in 1916, has become one of the casualties. Within months of the Wildlife Service "de-designating" a portion of its core area, a local developer levelled a four-acre site in the sand dunes to create another caravan park without, of course, bothering to seek planning permission in advance. "It's absolutely unbelievable what has happened here," Mr Pat Lawlor, chairman of the local residents' environmental group, said. "The sand is already blowing away as a result. And to think that this kind of thing is happening at so many other important sites all over the country." According to Conor Skehan, a Dublin environmental consultant, "the huge amount of cash floating around the country at present is one of the greatest threats to the environment. In the past, poverty saved us. Now everything is possible, but we still don't have a sufficiently deep culture of controls that are well meshed in the community."
The Old Head of Kinsale, which the State might have acquired for a song some years ago, is the most salutary example of the transformation of a wild, open headland into a privatised, partly-manicured enclosure. Anyone who just wants to walk the Old Head must now pay a fee of £1.50 at the gate.
Traditionally, the State's approach to nature conservation has been to designate some of the most sensitive areas as national parks, to be taken into public ownership. So far there are five such parks, in Killarney, Connemara, Glenveagh (Co Donegal), the Burren and the Wicklow Mountains, with a sixth on the way in north Mayo.
But the Heritage Council, in an unusually strong critique, has described this approach as fundamentally flawed, because it seeks to impose a regime suited to maintaining truly natural habitats, as defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on areas where local communities have been farming for centuries. And because "no adequate justification" had ever been offered for the current national parks model, the council suggested that the IUCN's "protected landscape" designation should be adopted instead. This would conserve nature, while allowing farming activities to continue, without requiring the entire area to be taken over by the State.
Throughout Europe, as the Heritage Council pointed out, the "protected landscape" designation is widely considered to be the most appropriate. Germany, for example, has just one national park and more than 400 protected landscapes. Why does Ireland have five national parks (soon to be six) and not a single protected landscape?