As Lenin would have said: "What is to be done?" The way forward, everyone seems to agree, is to forge a genuine partnership between State agencies, environmental groups and local communities to protect Ireland's cultural landscape while looking after the needs of people who live on the land.
This was the message which Mr Conor Skehan, a Dublin-based environmental consultant, delivered at a conference in Italy last year on the future of Europe's landscapes. What he proposed, in a joint study with Ms Jeanne Meldon, of An Taisce, was a landscape forum where the issues could be discussed.
He sees the landscape as a manifestation of the values of its inhabitants as they interact with the natural world. "The sense of belonging to a particular place has always been a very strong part of Irish culture. If we lose the people and their links with the land, we will be left with just wet hills which will be as empty as the highlands of Scotland."
The restructuring of agriculture, he believes, will divide the Republic into productive areas in the east and south, and non-productive areas in the north and west. "This is also creating a massive vacuum which is being filled by urban values about the need to preserve the scenery. So we're at a very crucial stage, a crux period in history."
What worries him is that vulnerable, peripheral communities "are putting all their eggs in the basket of tourism and having their values undermined by this dependence. Ultimately, they have to do everything it wants because tourism is a very jealous mistress, and that includes sterilising all other activities for the sake of preserving a view.
"The only way the landscape is going to stay alive is if people live in it all year round, own it, value it and care for it themselves from a knowledge base that's centred out there. Having half a dozen people who look like walk-ons from the set of The Field means the area is dead, as dead as last year's mutton."
The same point has been made by Friends of the Irish Environment, a ginger group set up last year to monitor the implementation of EU legislation. "Local people must retain control over their own local tourism industry," it said. "Once that slips from their hands, they have essentially lost the ability to remain in their own place."
The 1996 Bord Failte/An Taisce study, Tourism and the Land- scape, found that some communities fear being relegated to the status of "Indians on a reservation" or "live exhibits in an outdoor museum". Its solution was to recognise them as "guardians" of the landscape, supported by policies which recognise their valid development needs.
Mr Noel Kavanagh, heritage officer with Bord Failte, agrees there is "no alternative" to a partnership between State agencies and local communities. However, like Mr Skehan, he recognises that there are inherent dangers in devolving power to the lowest level, where people might be ill equipped to make the right decisions.
For example, what if local farmers are determined to sell off acre and half-acre sites on road frontages for urban-generated rural housing? Or what if a well-intentioned community group takes on the restoration of an important historic building, only to make a complete mess of it because nobody bothered to seek advice?
Mr Skekan concedes that "massive mistakes" are likely to be made but he says there will never be a right time to hand over power. "We have to have the courage of our convictions and faith in each other to hand it over, trusting in our own children and the education we're giving them that they'll not make as bad a mess of it as we can imagine."
However, steps must be taken to fill what Mr Kavanagh calls the "big black hole out there" through better education. This was also the conclusion of a "Heritage at the Crossroads" conference in Waterford last June, according to its convenor, Mr Ray McGrath. "We're very poorly informed to make intelligent decisions, despite the availability of so much information," he said.
He believes we need to develop a much deeper understanding of issues revolving around heritage and environment by forging alliances with conservation groups such as An Taisce. There was also a "very strong feeling" at the conference that a community "needs to feel ownership of its own heritage and to be educated and resourced to manage it".
As Mr Skehan sees it, the media have a role in "holding up a mirror, saying: `This is what you're making of yourself. Are you sure this is what you want'?" So too, do the professions involved in the planning process - architects, for example - as well as "cuttingedge opinion formers", such as those at the militant end of the conservation movement.
"At the local level, we need more people to articulate criticism and have the guts to say: `Well, I'm from this village too and that's complete rubbish.' But this second part of the dialogue hasn't come into play yet because the `makers-new' are having their way at present and those who disagree with them fear being pigeon-holed as spoilsports."
One of the unfortunate trends is what he calls "bollardisation", the use of standardised fake-Victorian lamp standards and bollards as well as red concrete cobblelock paving. "What's even worse is an attempt at authenticity which leads to a sort of leprechaunisation, where you get whatever people imagine as `traditional' foisted on the place."
Instead of madly tidying things up and eliminating all evidence of indigenous "scruffiness", Mr Skehan believes that we need to develop a "common sensibility, in the classic sense of the word" towards what we have and hold. "We have to throw off the shackles of being `traditional' and move towards the confidence of being distinctively Irish."
In Britain it is increasingly being recognised that sustainable villages are no longer about "chocolate box" aesthetics, neat hedges and glorious flowerbeds. Last year's "village of the year" was Coniston, in Cumbria, where there is a very high level of community spirit.
Scotland and Wales now impose fairly punitive taxes on second homes to ensure that competition from well-heeled outsiders does not price locals out of the housing market. In Denmark there is a ban on holiday homes in coastal areas, while in Switzerland rural cottages which come up for sale are bought up by the local co-op and then rented out.
Ireland, however, has no controls over the spread of holiday homes and even actively encourages their development with tax incentives in designated "seaside resorts". Mr Skehan believes it would have been much better to promote investment in hotels in places such as Killarney, where there is a very well-established tourism culture.
Yet Killarney has some 20,000 tourist beds and becomes congested during the summer. Might it not make more sense to disperse visitors more widely throughout Ireland, thereby relieving the "honeypots" and spreading the benefits of tourism?
Having a single, all-Ireland tourist board as has been proposed would make a big difference, assuming that peace returns to the North. But in the interim, there are many who believe that Bord Failte should have a much stronger role, not just in marketing Ireland but also in protecting the asset base of Irish tourism.
"Bord Failte was probably the most successful tourist body in the world and they've managed to kill it," says Mr Eamon Ryan, who runs Irish Cycling Safaris. It was "gutted" by Mr Charlie McCreevy when he was Minister for Tourism in the early 1990s, and since then there has been "too much emphasis on marketing and not enough on the product".
The "product" is Ireland. And while Bord Failte used to call the shots, it has now been displaced by a bewildering array of regional and county tourism organisations, all competing with each other for business, and by a growing band of niche marketing groups on the accommodation front, which many tourists find baffling.
Bord Failte remains a prescribed body under the Planning Acts, even though its monitoring role in this area has also been stripped away. Yet there is no reason why the board should not have a dual function in promoting development and protecting the environment.
Certainly, some form of centralised control is needed to mitigate the damage caused by excessive exploitation of fragile sites, such as Dun Aengus, on Inishmore, the most swamped of the Aran Islands. We also need a coherent national policy on sustainable tourism; so far, only the Northern Ireland Tourist Board has produced one.
It need not necessarily involve such Stalinist measures as taking into State ownership almost every important "wild" landscape and turning them into national parks. That approach suffered a significant reversal recently when the Supreme Court struck down plans to compulsorily acquire the uninhabited Great Blasket Island as a national historic park.
To overcome congestion in towns like Clifden and Dingle, we will soon have to take our cue from some of the small, delicate Italian hill towns which have devised a series of concentric zones setting strict limits on the movement of cars and tour buses, or from towns on the Italian Riviera, where cars are no longer allowed at all.
And instead of, say, ruining Slea Head by widening its narrow road to cope with increasing volumes of traffic, it would be much more sensible if Kerry County Council introduced a one-way system on the loop which connects Dingle, Dunquin and Ballyferriter. Already, bus tour operators have voluntarily agreed to travel oneway around the Ring of Kerry.
Mr Skehan says it is also "just conceivable" that tourists could travel up and down the west coast by boat, staying in different places along the way.
Some 121 applications have been submitted for the £3 million pilot programme on tourism and the environment announced last November. Mr Kavanagh expects that 25 projects will be selected for funding to demonstrate best practice in resolving some of the more obvious problems, such as litter and traffic congestion.
One of the solutions he strongly favours is the development of alternative "hubs", such as Birr, Co Offaly, to "open up the interior" to tourism and take some of the pressure off places like the Ring of Kerry.
Ireland cannot credibly sustain an open-ended tourism promotion policy until we have resolved some of the problems which already exist: restricted access to the countryside, the lack of statutory protection for SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) and the pollution of such important resources as the Shannon.
And what about the "branding" of the Irish tourism product? In one of his first acts as Minister for Tourism, Dr McDaid decreed that Bord Failte must revert to the tired old shamrock and abandon the more modern logo devised in co-operation with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. It was a pathetic and reactionary response to a non-problem.
As for all the "Celtic Tiger" hype, Mr Ryan has doubts. "People don't want to go to a `Celtic Tiger' economy on their holidays. They want to get away from it all, and what we've been selling is an image of Ireland as an idyllic retreat. What happens when they come here and find that it's congested like everywhere else?"