From quiet seaside town to booming resort, Kinvara, in Co Galway, is growing at a rapid pace. But will it leave enough room for its unique spirit, asks Richard Tillinghast.
In the early 1990s I lived for a year in Kinvara, Co Galway - past its prime as a fishing village but still a lively spot on Galway Bay, with some 400 inhabitants and nine pubs. Perched on the edge of the Burren, Kinvara is the centre of a farming community, a great place to listen to traditional music, and home to a community of artists and writers who have brought new energy to a village formerly in decline.
Most of these people are blow-ins, some Irish, some Dutch, some English, some German, some American. Liadain O'Donovan, Frank O'Connor's daughter, moved here decades ago from San Francisco. Author, singer, folklorist and bonsai-grower Caoilte Breathnach lives up the Gort Road. Irish ceramicist John ffrench, Belgian photographer Nutan, and journalist and local historian Jeff O'Connell all have homes on the nearby Doorus peninsula. Author Kate Thompson lives on the Moy Road, as does singer-songwriter John Prine. Naturalist and artist Gordon D'Arcy has a house in nearby Ballindereen and German artist Anne Korff publishes the Tír Eolas line of books and annotated maps in Doorus.
There are amateur poets and musicians, organic growers, homeopathic medicine practitioners - it's a vibrant artistic and countercultural pot-pourri.
I recently revisited Kinvara and found many changes. Development and pollution of the bay are common topics of conversation. Traffic on Main Street is formidable, as Kinvara now has both a morning and an evening rush hour. The attractive and well-constructed houses in Mike Burke's luxury Cuan an Óir (Gold Coast) development sell for €1 million and more, yet long-time residents owning land outside the town often have difficulty getting planning permission. Some fear that Kinvara's unique character and quality of life will be lost if only the rich can afford to live here and if houses bought as second homes stand empty much of the year. Many people lament the absence of any provision for new social housing.
Others, such as publican Michael Connolly, feel differently. "I welcome new development," he says. "When I left school, 11 out of 14 in my class had to go abroad. The place was dead."
Jeff O'Connell recalls that when he first moved to Kinvara in 1974 there was no butcher, no place to buy groceries other than a few canned goods and a loaf of bread in Tully's, a small combination shop and pub on the main street. People bought necessities from the travelling grocer who drove around the countryside in his truck. Yet, even with the new prosperity, few of my friends' children can afford to live in Kinvara. There are few jobs outside tourism.
For many years, Winkles Hotel on the square was the only hostelry in Kinvara. Tiffy Winkle was one of the west of Ireland's great characters, and both Peter O'Toole and Robert Mitchum were said to do imitations of her. Conversing with a stranger, she would interject questions such as "And would those be your own teeth?" or "What do you call that colour your hair is now?". Tiffy could be seen surreptitiously cracking the eggs for sale in the open market in the square in order to get the price reduced.
Her son, Tony Moylan, who founded Kinvara's Cruinniú na mBád (Gathering of the Boats) festival, and his wife, Phil, took over the pub from Tiffy and ran it from 1988 to 2005, when it became one of the finest traditional music venues in Ireland.
Where Winkles once stood, John Burke (Mike Burke's brother) is building a shopping mall on the square. It will occupy an entire block. Residents appealed to An Bord Pleanála and succeeded in having the mall downsized from Burke's initial proposal; they also convinced the developer that the traditional Friday market should be preserved. This close-knit village thrives on compromise and consensus.
LIZ MURPHY WAS born here and has restored the old corn store on the quay, with its limestone facade, as a shop and cafe, with living quarters for herself on the upper floors. She regrets that the shopping mall's style departs from the architectural vernacular of dignified 18th- and 19th-century row houses that line the main street.
On the square I peeked through the windows of Winkles, where Niamh Parsons and Sean and Dolores Keane once sang, and where Sean Smyth, Brendan Larrissey and Frankie Gavin used to play the fiddle, along with box players Jackie Daly, Charlie Piggott and Sharon Shannon when she was still an unknown.
The wooden floor Phil Moylan installed for set dancing was littered with builders' debris. The limestone fireplace-surround she had found somewhere and installed had been ripped out of the wall. Photographs of Kinvara's traditional musicians figure prominently in the sumptuous brochure Mike Burke provides for Cuan an Óir, yet Winkles is closed, and so is Tully's further up Main Street.
"Something is missing with Tully's gone," John Griffin, proprietor of the Ould Plaid Shawl, told me. "You'd start the evening with a pint at Tully's and work your way down the street."
On the cover of the Cuan an Óir brochure, a locally-built Galway hooker, the Mac Duach, floats on tranquil Kinvara Bay with Dungaire Castle in the background. There's no more beautiful sight in Ireland. Kinvara is known far and wide for its Cruinniú na mBád festival in August. But all is not well beneath the surface of the bay. Until as recently as six years ago, sewage treatment facilities were, for mysterious reasons, not required of new developments. The town's raw sewage - 70,000 gallons a day - issues directly into the bay through a pipe only about 40 yards in length. A release valve designed to shut off at low tide has corroded and is stuck in the "open" position. If you sail from Crushua to Kinvara, you can see a line of raw sewage coming out into the bay. It is not a pretty sight.
ECOLOGIST CILIAN RODEN explained to me that Kinvara Bay is a basin, partially but not completely flushed out by the tides. A brackish underground river empties into the saltwater bay, bringing agricultural run-off into already polluted water. The resultant eutrophication, or artificial enrichment, causes algae to grow. When alga dies it turns brown and gives off a sulphurous smell. Seen from above, the demarcation between the brown waters of Kinvara Bay and the blue waters of Galway Bay makes a startling contrast.
While readings in excess of 2,000 pathogenic microbes per millimetre would be considered a health hazard, Kinvara Bay's levels can sometimes reach 10,000 per millimetre.
Both Mike Burke and Liz Murphy remember swimming off the quay as children; only a fool would swim there today. Cairde Cuan Chinn Mhara (Friends of Kinvara Bay), backed by an EU ruling, has been asking Galway County Council for a sewage treatment plant for the past decade, but results have not been forthcoming. As of this writing, work is supposed to commence on a treatment plant in 2008 or 2009, but some say the plant may be a decade away.
The urban sprawl of Galway city, 17 miles up the road, creeps closer every day. Oranmore has effectively disappeared as a separate entity.
My heart sank as I drove past the barrack-like rows of houses in a treeless development called Oak Wood outside Ballindereen. "Oak Wood" ironically echoes the town's Irish name. In 2000, Kinvara's Community Council launched an initiative to "create a vision for Kinvara", then appealed to Galway County Council. Funding was secured from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government for a pilot project, facilitated by the Tipperary Institute. The result was the Kinvara Integrated Area Plan (IAP), whose three main goals were: sewerage; no more than a doubling of population within 10 years, revitalisation of the town centre. The plan also called for a community creche, a children's playground and a drop-in centre for teenagers. The county council has delivered on none of these.
Something happened to the plan once it reached the council. Individual landowners petitioned to have their agricultural land zoned residential. The council zoned 135 acres residential, and the council's elected representatives added 15 more. At minimum density standards of roughly three dwellings per acre, at least 450 new houses could be built. To describe the least alarming scenario, if only two-fifths of the 150 acres are developed, population could rise by 200 per cent, twice what the community wants.
The county council continues to delay sewage treatment and has done nothing about other IAP goals. Kinvara's efforts to control its own destiny speak well for its "great ould spirit", while at the same time dramatising the limits on local democracy in a system where decisions are made at the county level rather than locally.
At this point, Kinvara is still a lovely place to live or to visit, full to the brim with talent, energy and vision. As I write, its hurling team has reached the county finals. What a pity Kinvara's citizens are not allowed to decide democratically what is good for their own village.
Richard Tillinghast's poem, A Quiet Pint in Kinvara, with artwork by Anne Korf, is available as a chapbook from both Tír Eolas and Salmon Publishing. He lives in Tipperary
