Our special landscapes deserve a policy

Mweelrea, the mountain in my window, is growing its summer shadows - drifting blue-grey darks of uncertain depth and fluffy edges: the mood for June in its seasonal transformations. Also: "The fine Ordovician greywacke cliffs on the north side carry high-level communities with some unusual species."

Below me, the duach at this time greens over like a great croquet lawn behind the dunes, and more fresh green turf unrolls along each slope and terrace of the creggans. As unfenced commonage, you can walk it all, magically uplifted above lakes and ocean. Also: "The wide occurrence of windblown sand, the presence of temporary stream channels and of seasonally flooded grassland are interesting habitat features."

Both Mweelrea and Dooaghtry have long been "of national importance" as "areas of scientific interest" (ASIs). I quote from their descriptions in the inventory produced by An Foras Forbartha, once the State's advisory institute on planning and ecological affairs. It was exactly 30 years ago that it urged protection of "the national heritage", but defined this as a fabric of scientific and historical sites - not a word about beauty or landscape.

This launched a general impression that "heritage" was either about ruins and old buildings, or about bits of rough countryside where scientists, for their own weird and distant reasons, wanted the plants, birds and snails left alone. While Northern Ireland applied the UK designation "areas of outstanding natural beauty" to places such as the Mournes, the Ring of Gullion, Upper and Lower Lough Erne, the Republic refused to acknowledge anything so fanciful.

Duchas has whittled down the original ASIs to create 1,250 natural heritage areas, still in the painful process of implementation. These are not concerned with landscape as people perceive it, but as the varied habitats of flora and fauna. The fact that the areas of greatest ecological value are often the wild landscapes we most enjoy is fine, but really beside the point.

The emphasis on "scientific interest" in conservation is beginning to backfire, when, in the hands of lazy media, a threatened "rare snail", or whatever, can be used to trivialise important issues of landscape priority. More importantly, it is allowing the aesthetic quality of landscape to slip into second place.

Landscape and seascape finally entered the frame of "national heritage", alongside nature and its habitats, with the 1995 Act that set up the Heritage Council, another step urged by An Foras Forbartha 30 years ago. Based in Kilkenny, with a dozen hard-worked staff, it is still finding its feet in a brief that gives it powers and objectives way beyond its modest resources.

At a time of unprecedented spending on construction, with every prospect of a huge and permanent jump in population and a further steady rise in tourism, there is no national planning policy, nor any sense of a controlling strategy at work to govern the impact of building on landscape. Local authorities are over their heads in planning applications, a good many of which impinge on one or other element of "heritage" and ought to be referred to the council.

This April, however, after much consultation, it announced it would get involved in planning decisions "only in exceptional circumstances". Its role will be "strategic", advising the Government on heritage planning policy, and improving methods of heritage appraisal for local development plans. Beseeched for help and advice, it has put the first three heritage officers into local authorities.

Also in April, the council, through its chairperson, Freda Rountree, made a major commitment to a policy document on landscape - this following a big consultative conference in Co Offaly with planners, State agencies and non-governmental organisations. Among the delegates was Terry O'Regan, whose freelance campaign for a national landscape policy since 1994, with its impressive and diverse annual forums, has finally brought its reward. He will stage one more forum, in September, and then await the council's document next spring.

Will that really be time enough, or are there pressing "exceptional circumstances" demanding an interim policy view? One of them might well be the surge of proposals for windfarms in the west, most spectacularly for the back of the Aran Islands, where their power could, apparently, be used to desalinate seawater: an ingenious "green" solution to a perennial island problem. Yes, but what will their towers do visually to that superb sequence of limestone cliffs, thrustingly horizontal, unique in the world?

Prof Michael Dower, the English countryside planner who helped An Foras Forbartha set up its services to local authorities, wrote recently of Europe's duty to recognise and conserve great landscapes which "have inspired artists, drawn travellers and achieved fame far beyond the immediate locality". He was citing the Lake District and the hills of Tuscany - he might well have included Aran.

It will take a body such as the Heritage Council to make landscape judgments in the national - even European - interest. It is also one of the "public authorities" whose views An Bord Pleanala will have to keep in mind. But the most difficult work ahead will not arise from major landscapes, protected habitats or the separate elements of heritage.

Somebody has got to save lowland Ireland from becoming a joined-up Los Angeles, an island-wide maze of roads lined entirely with front gates and bungalow gardens, the "landscape" walled off at the back. But we knew that 30 years ago.

The National Landscape Forum 1999 will be held in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, on September 9th and 10th. Details from Landscape Alliance Ireland, Old Abbey Gardens, Waterfall, Cork (021-871460), email: lai.link@indigo.ie