I note with misery that Clare County Council has given itself permission to build a multimillion-euro tourist processing plant at the modest spectacle provided by nature herself: the short stretch of not-very-high cliffs at the Cliffs of Moher. I had hoped that the difficulties local farmers raised when asked to sell their land to the bureaucrats would last long enough for fashion to change around again, and that by the time they gave in, proposals such as the present one for a ludicrously inflated visitor center would not be tolerated. But no such luck.
If any reader cares to head for the Cliffs of Moher now, they will find there the original attraction – the stretch of cliff which the County Council can do nothing to enhance or diminish. They will find about six wind-blown and very happy winter tourists wandering about the simple Victorian pathways, which are all that are needed, as a matter of fact, to walk a hundred yards so as to look back and duly note that you have been walking on a cliff. Go up to the visitors and ask them whether they feel the need for an audio-visual theater. Guess what: they don’t. They made their way to the cliff to be in a relatively unspoiled part of Ireland that is easily accessible and on a tourist route. They have not gone there to study cliffs, with the aid of audio-visual props. Nor, I take it, have they gone there to see an exhibition.
The exhibition and theater the council wants to build are pure gigantism on the part of the council and the people with a stake in the thing getting built. What the visitors would like is something hot to drink, something to eat, toilets, and a souvenir shop. Those are there already. They are also available, in lavish abundance, in a radius of one to three miles in cafés, pubs, and restaurants. Oh, there are so many places to have a bowl of soup within five minutes of the Cliffs of Moher that to build a restaurant there is whatever the opposite of a priority is.
Of course, a lot of places are closed in the winter. That is because – Clare County Council, are you listening? – there are few tourists in West Clare in winter. Your theater and exhibition space and restaurant will be closed for at least half the year and you – we – will be left with the maintenance of your white elephant. If you were not bureaucrats – if you were people venturing your own money and needing to repay loans or make a profit – you wouldn’t dream of building a visitor center that needs to be as big as you’ve planned it, for only two months in the year.
Has anyone, by the way, ever bothered finding out how much money is made or lost in visitor centers, such as the one in Kenagh in Longford, or the one in Dunquin, or the one not 20 minutes from Clare County Council’s headquarters, in Coole Park? Almost all visitor centers should be temporary, dismantleable structures. However, once the boys get their teeth into a nice expensive plan they all want to build Croke Park.
The Cliffs of Moher are, in themselves, to put it at its strongest, mildly exciting. They became a tourist attraction because they were near enough to Lahinch for the nineteenth-century ladies to be driven out there for a healthy blast of air. And because they’re just a few steps off the main road. Also because they’re a handy stop-off between Killarney and Galway. Like, they’re not a destination. But the reason I send visitors there, and the reason that I’m so upset at the council’s plans, is that they’re in a lovely, unspoiled setting. Because the landowners held out, there are only low and unobtrusive buildings beside the existing car park. Beautiful old fields edged, still, with the flagstone of the region, surround the present visitor center. The road is the old one. The slope of fields down to Liscannor is a miraculous patchwork quilt in shades of turquoise green.
Now the council’s “traffic management scheme” – designed to cope with the crowds coming to the audio-visual theater and the exhibition space, no doubt – will involve further car parks and, I suppose, road-widening and -straightening. Nothing more instantly makes Clare ordinary. Its landscape is one of small effects, made by the work of humans over centuries – walls and fields and winding lanes and farm buildings and houses. It is small-scale and domestic. It is utterly unlike the wilderness around the Céide Fields, in County Mayo, just as the availability of restaurants in tourist Clare is utterly unlike their availability in Mayo west of Ballycastle.
None of the Clare attractions – not one – needs a Céide Fields–type visitor center. The most they’re going to need in the foreseeable future is a way of managing cars and coaches so as to unclog the roads in high summer – preferably a small-scale, unobtrusive, eco-sensitive transport plan involving one-way systems down back lanes and something like the horses-and-buggies of yore or electric mini-buses. Something from this, the twenty-first century. Not, as this proposed center is, a grandiose leftover from the past.
The Irish Times Magazine, February 2, 2002