There are tattered bits of planning application notices stuck to plywood boards in every second field in rural Ireland. Several of them are nailed to poles along the lane that I look on as home myself. I couldn’t have hoped that my corner would be left untouched. When I heard a bulldozer on Christmas Eve I tried to think positively – to be grateful for the nearly nine years I’ve had, during which only two new houses went up and only one of those slap-bang in front of me. I said to myself that other people deserve the benefit of this place as much as I do. I said everything positive I could think of to myself. But I lament, and it is not just personal. I’m watching the transformation of one Irish townland from an ancient agricultural settlement into a middle-class suburb.
The fact is that the small farming that shaped this place is finished. And there’s no way of keeping a farm landscape meaningful without farming. My area is still held in thrall by the mud-covered, agile little cattle who are the living beings most at home on this island and who I can imagine surviving here after humans are gone. But eventually we may have to conceive of an Ireland without cattle. What will become of all the Irish men who have few skills or little conversation outside the same beasts?
There are slatted sheds and calves and slurry-spreaders and chewed-up lanes, fields and burst silage bales and all that all around where I live, and mavericks are forever smashing through hedges and getting out on the road, providing a primitive kind of entertainment. But those tools to making a living are not going to last. There isn’t a living to be made from cattle and REPS (Rural Environmental Protection Scheme) subsidies. A hard worker in my part of the west could probably make a living for one person from 30 acres. But you can get more than what you’d earn in one year of extremely hard work for one small house site. The farmers around here – where planning permission can be got – may have small incomes, but they’re sitting on fortunes. On the other hand, a lot of small farmers don’t want to sell land. Land and its management is their heritage and their culture.
When a field has gone for a bungalow with dormer windows (and seven or eight bedrooms, to set the place up for doing Bed & Breakfast), it is gone for ever. Suddenly the field’s ancient furniture isn’t relevant: the stone walls, the stiles and steps, the windbreaks for animals. Most of the new walls are breeze-block. I think there’s a Clare County Council guideline about facing breeze-block walls in stone, but if there is, it certainly isn’t enforced around my place. But then, it is impossible to guess from the new housing around what the planners want West Clare to look like. The only policy that would have made a difference to the visual aspect of this area was never even tried: that is, that the refurbishment of existing houses and cottages would be vigorously preferred to new houses. Everyone goes for a new house, and they all seem to be off the same plan. A planner’s plan: it is inconceivable that absolutely everyone, for miles around, wanted dormer windows.
There is a community around here, of course. The old families have known each other forever. There’s a further community of people who are not from this exact townland but are in the know about it. Anywhere in Ireland, the local garda and doctor and estate agent and teacher and solicitor and hardware merchant and county councillor and TD and property developer, roughly speaking, know who owns what land, what problems they have, what their characters are like, whether they’ll sell, to whom they’ll sell, how much money will be upfront and how much hidden, what effect the sale will have on the seller’s life, etc., etc.
People like me don’t and can’t belong to either of these communities, even if, like me, they’ve been coming to the area for 25 years. In fact, if I were ever shown the inside track, I’d view the invitation with the greatest suspicion. There is one last generation of small farmers still with us. They go into Saturday-evening Mass on their tractors and they might take a pint afterwards and the supermarket gets their messages ready in a cardboard box and they go to the mart and they can play traditional instruments – many of them, this being Clare. If they were at a wedding, they might dance the figure of a set for fun. They believe in God and Mary and the GAA and funnily enough, around here, Fine Gael. Their nephews and nieces aren’t going to turn into those old men. The courteous and witty and highly individual personalities that were somehow nurtured in the hard world of small farming are dying out.
Large parts of the country are still shaped to the old men’s ways. The new communities haven’t formed yet. Will they ever? We incomers have no task in common in what was a farming landscape, and nothing else to share. And this period will leave wounds. The etiquette and ethics involved in the changeover from land-for-farming to land-for-houses are by no means agreed upon. I myself do not approve of my own nostalgia for a way of life that was so hard on men, women, and children and that led to so much self-destructiveness. Maybe it will be a healthier Ireland when it is, effectively, a series of housing estates interspersed with towns. The feel of a landscape, however, shaped to a communal purpose by long experience, will be gone.
The Irish Times Magazine, February 17, 2001