The fashionable hobby of saving nature

'My Patellas are nearly extirpated," wrote a Bangor naturalist, James Clealand, to a scientist friend in 1823. "They became so much the fashion that the Visitors who frequented Bangor as Sea Bathers, during the last two summers, employed the children to collect them, and there is not one to be seen now."

I think of Clealand losing his limpets whenever it's suggested that Ireland's current interest in nature is in some way a fashionable freak of the times. For social fashion, nothing today compares with the craze for nature that overcame the Victorian middle-classes, notably in Britain but also in Ireland.

Liberated from the cities by the astonishing spread of the railways, and excited by collecting the beautiful and strange, their en masse excursions to furnish home aquariums and ferneries had an impact on nature that is now hard to credit.

"Great stretches of the coast were largely stripped of their attractive inhabitants," wrote David Elliston Allen in his social history, The Naturalist in Britain. "Whole areas were cleared of ferns, helped by professional touts who ... filled up great cart-loads from the wilder parts of Britain." In Ireland, rare and exquisite plants such as the Killarney fern, Trichomanes speciosum, were brought close to extinction by such plunder.

Without radio or television to stimulate and educate them, the new enthusiasts were avid buyers of popular handbooks to flowers, birds and seashells, written by schoolmasters and clergymen. In 1858, the plainly-named Common Objects of the Countryside sold 100,000 copies in its first week.

Times changed and fashionable obsessions moved on. Nature's scars mended, and the natural sciences developed alongside attitudes to wildlife that were largely shaped by literary and cultural emotion. In Ireland, "nature study", even in the schools, was marginalised by the thrusting agendas of nationalism and agrarian reform.

Times changed again, and what had been seen as the hobbies of residual and eccentric West Brits were absorbed into mainstream culture, as television presented a quite new slant on wildlife, ecologically concerned and conservationist. Today we have Mooney Goes Wild on One, bright and professional membership magazines such as Wings from BirdWatch Ireland, Releafing Ireland from Crann, The Badger from the Irish Wildlife Trust and, most recently of all, a news-stand magazine of international quality, Wild Ireland.

Even as a collection of hobbyists, the vibrant, youthful movement of Irish nature-lovers (let's not despise the term) might be expected to find some reflection in the country's political arena. As people whose concerns are shared by the European Commission, setting programmes and standards of habitat conservation that are hugely significant for Irish land-use and landscape, their goodwill might seem even more worth considering.

Yet nowhere in the ranks of the big parties is there anyone who seems to feel - or dares to express - an honest enthusiasm for nature and its conservation.

Charles Haughey, ironically, was an exception: a wholeheartedly "green" EU president and Lord Protector of whales and deer.

But now we are back with the culture of the cumainn, in which drinking beer and watching ball-games are at the core of manly national pastimes, and Bertie seeks to spend on a redundant football stadium what would pay for planting a national, properly wild, broadleaf forest, big enough to get lost in.

The two Government ministers who have been dealing with nature conservation - Sile de Valera and Eamon O Cuiv - were given the job of implementing Ireland's commitments to Special Areas of Conservation without alienating Fianna Fail's small-farm vote in the west. The stresses and strains of this long process do much to explain O Cuiv "no" vote, and , a disturbing letter to this newspaper from David Herman (of Keep Ireland Open), whose guidebooks have taken thousands of Irish walkers and tourists safely through the uplands, told of the IFA's rebuff to the idea of a meeting to talk about access and increasingly unpleasant episodes of confrontation - this despite the scrupulous consideration that walkers showed in staying off the bogs and hills during the FMD scare.

Most of the clashes have occurred along the western seaboard, often in prime tourist areas. Six years ago, the IFA and walking clubs took part in a major weekend conference at University College, Galway: "Seeking a Partnership Towards Managing Ireland's Uplands". This produced an impressive volume of papers from all kinds of "stakeholder" perspectives, but no significant action.

In the east of the country, on the other hand, in the same year, the Wicklow Uplands Council was formed as a grass-roots community organisation representing more than 30 different interest groups, including landowners. It has secured considerable trust as a problem-sorting forum, has brought in signs to help people follow the rules in crossing private land, and heads off vandalism and maverick bikers through a voluntary countryside warden scheme.

In the south-west, too, the people below the Brandon Mountains on the Dingle Peninsula have sorted out access to the hills, co-operating to lay out marked walking trails as a positive attraction to the B& class of visitor. This is obviously a much better way forward than acting nationally to impose, and pay for, any system of statutory rights-of-way.

Ireland is urbanising fast, and the countryside will have to accommodate new views of its role for recreation and pleasure - not least when it's the townspeople who foot most of the bill for rural grants and subsidies.

Partnership, not rows at the fence, is the only way to go.