When a terrible ugliness is born

On the first fine day of 2000, I have resolved to take some pictures of the place where I live. May I run through them? The fields of big, deep lazy-beds, grassed over since the Famine (taken when the sun catches them, first thing). The low cottage roof where the road climbs over the hill, the house where Maggie lived, with the bog-deal beams and a bed in the wall.

The small, white farmhouses beyond, perched beside each other on a ridge and framed against the sea. The view from the bend in the road, of the big strand far below and the open, empty swathe of sheep-pastures behind it, brilliantly green. The view towards the mountain, with no houses on the hillside for a whole mile or more.

The top of the boreen and the grassy banks where children wait for the bus. The bottom of the boreen where the river makes a ford. The final wisp of road below the mountain, where the tourist camper-vans tilt into the ditch. The sharp bend above the post office with the great view of Carrowniskey's breakers. The sand-dunes, with their shovel-scars, their storm-bites.

Not all of these things will change in the next decade, but much more than I'd like. Here at the edge of the West there comes a distant growl of caterpillar treads, of gears whining beyond the hills. It is the sound of roads widening, concrete pouring, heavy money on the move. Forty billion pounds to be spent in six years: a breakneck torrent of construction, an avalanche of Lego!

If panic creeps into my voice, it is because we have used up so much of our time for talk. Set against the revving of diggers, the thunder of quarry-blasting, we strain for the measured tones of Prof Fred Aalen of Trinity, offering his recent wisdom to the Heritage Council:

"If we wish to nurture landscape character and identity, while facilitating desirable socio-economic developments, then control and management of landscape change seems the only responsible course of action. We must insist that changes made in the landscape are attentive to historical continuity, local distinctiveness and evolving tradition.

"Innovation should be harmonised with existing features, working with the grain of field and farm patterns, respecting the layout of historic settlements, using local building materials and methods, and developing the essentials of traditional building forms; nowhere facile mimicry but imaginative development."

Well, yes, we must insist - but how? Strengthen the planning system, for a start, says Dr Aalen, and bring in new types of planner, educated in landscape history, landscape ecology and rural economics. All proposals for rural development must be carefully "landscape-proofed" - assessed and adapted to local landscape conditions.

How likely does that seem? In its National Development Plan, the Government has promised "eco-audits" of policies and programmes. But in its planning priorities so far, smoothing the way for investment comes high. And beyond the State's own spending lies the Celtic Tiger's great mass of private construction - houses, second homes, hotels and the rest. Unless we are exceedingly lucky, all is to change, change utterly, and a terrible ugliness will be born.

The new motorways and highways, however well-muffled in marginal, well-mannered trees, will impose a quite new mood on the lowland countryside. In their taming matrix of altered time and space, the bits of land in between will be somehow diminished, with little room for mystery or natural anarchy: beyond those trees, another road, and then the next. Once, it was the landscape that ruled the roads, letting them wriggle through its contours; now the theodolite rules OK.

In the interstices of countryside, the great burden of managing the landscape falls upon the local authority planners, already wilting under new applications. They would like, very often, to "preserve the authentic character of the local landscape" - if only they were sure what composed it. Builders, too, might want to build "in sympathy" with the landscape and local tradition, if someone could show them the line between tradition and pastiche.

What is needed, everyone seems to agree, is an Irish Landscape Catalogue - a complete picture of all the different types, each with its distinctive character based on local geology, landforms, land use, cultural and ecological features. Britain, Norway, the Netherlands and other countries are already ahead on this. Northern Ireland has a record of no fewer than 130 different types, meant "to provide guidance for accommodating different forms of change within the landscape, allowing change to be positive and creative."

At the other end of the island, an interim Landscape of Cork Report* has been published by the Landscape Working Group of the Cork Environmental Forum, a cross-community initiative covering both city and county. First of its recommendations is the setting up of a database "documenting the natural and man-made landscape of Cork in all its immense diversity". This could well become a pilot study backed by the Heritage Council.

Meanwhile, are there 10 pictures of your own that you really ought to take - 10 bits of your daily landscape that you'd miserably miss? Not my romantic western slide-show, perhaps, but passages that satisfy or console you? Even in the city: bits of brave greenery, streetscapes with human character, memorial fragments, bricks and branches, stonework, secret gardens?

Take a camera, too, in this millennial year, to the classic rural landscapes you've grown up with, the fond wayside pauses of your Irish life. This is how it looked in 2000, before the money rolled in.

* An interim Landscape of Cork Report is available from the Cork Environmental Forum, County Hall, Cork

Michael Viney can be contacted at viney@anu.ie