DID you know that 85 per cent of this country is owned by farmers? Do you believe it? Well, Joe Hall, an Agriculturalist with Teagasc, working in recent years with the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, tells us that it is so.
And agriculture is therefore important to the landscape! Des Gunning tells a story: "Bad men from Dublin came and took away our landscape, and I'm pretty annoyed over the fact that they did, because they never asked me about it and it was my landscape, but those big, bad men worked for a state agency, so it was all right, wasn't it?" Fighting talk.
Neil Hegarty, an architect, asks about Cork church landscape and what is going to happen to it unless every body starts going back to church again ... "We have the most magnificent church buildings of the nineteenth century, built by different religions, people are not using them as much any more ... Can we convert them all. Do we take off the roofs and grow ivy on the walls? I can see this as a very big problem for the future."
That's a tiny selection of quotations from a splendid publication that has just arrived in the post. It is the proceedings of the Irish Landscape Forum of 1995, held at UCD, edited by Terry O'Regan of Waterfall, Cork, a landscaper himself. It is a soft-covered production of about 140 pages, with a sprightly, witty cover by Raven Design, and readable as bedamned. Speakers were held to ten minutes each, and that's a miracle of a sort. You can buy it for £10 incl. p.&p.
But the additional news is that the second National Landscape Forum is being held in UCD on May 17th with, again, a most diverse list of speakers, including Freda Rountree, who chairs The Heritage Council. All the things we argue about will be dragged out for praise and blame.
"Fitting the Forest into the Landscape": John McLoughlin of Coillte may get his ears warmed. And some people aren't entirely convinced about windmills for energy being other than a blight on the landscape. Ciaran King of the Wind Energy Association will be talking. Then the Protection of Our Archaeological Heritage by John Cronin and more than a dozen other speakers and topics. Cost of Forum, £75, includes copy of publication of the proceedings. Students, unemployed, NGOs £45 or £35. Ring Terry O'Regan at 021-871460.