Only four per cent of us take an active interest in protecting Ireland's heritage, according to an awareness survey commissioned by the Heritage Council. Interestingly, the survey also found that we tend to think of "heritage" more in terms of historic buildings than our landscape and natural environment.
Passage tombs, ruined abbeys, medieval castles, stately homes, imposing neo-classical public buildings and the streetscapes of planned towns are no longer contaminated by alien associations with invaders, landlords or belted earls; they have all been embraced as part of what we are, even if we still have our blind spots.
So what is "heritage"? According to a comprehensive definition in the 1995 Heritage Act, it includes monuments, architecture, archaeological and other heritage objects, as well as flora, fauna, wildlife habitats, geology, inland waterways, heritage gardens and parks, landscapes, seascapes and even - believe it or not - wrecks.
Despite growing public awareness, conservationists argue that Ireland's heritage is itself being wrecked by the unprecedented development pressures generated by the "Celtic Tiger" economy, which puts short-term gain ahead of protecting the irreplaceable. Month after month, their conviction grows that everything is up for grabs.
Right at this moment, Carton Demesne in Co Kildare, the most intact 18th century landscape in Ireland, is being developed as an upmarket golf resort, with dozens of "villas" dotted through the trees. There is a similar plan for Durrow Abbey in Co Offaly, affecting one of the most important early Christian monastic sites on the island.
But it is not only private developers who are making the running. The £40 billion National Development Plan will also, by its own admission, lead to "unsustainable patterns of development", particularly through its accelerated roads programme, with plans being laid for motorways or dual-carriageways between the main population centres.
Duchas, the Heritage Service, recently did a deal with the National Roads Authority under which it will be sufficient merely to record archaeological sites prior to their destruction. Yet less than a year earlier, Duchas was supposedly committed to a new policy specifying that "preservation in situ must always be the first option".
According to the Heritage Council, an independent statutory agency set up in 1995 to advise the Government on heritage matters, Ireland's archaeological heritage "is now more under threat than at any time in history", with a third of recorded sites already destroyed and the rate of destruction increasing to an unprecedented 10 per cent per decade.
Yet the council was not even consulted about the deal between Duchas and the NRA. Had it been asked for a view, says its planning officer, Paddy Mathews, the council would have suggested that the NRA should carry out "heritage appraisals" in advance of selecting any route, to avoid needless destruction of archaeological sites.
But then, Duchas is prone to compromise. As a division of the Department of Arts and Heritage, it comes under political pressure to facilitate development, as in the case of a candidate Special Area of Conservation (SAC) in Doonbeg, Co Clare, where a major golf-based leisure scheme could only proceed if the boundaries were re-drawn.
Shannon Development, another State agency, was promoting the plan by Landmark National, a US company whose Irish subsidiary is chaired by Senator George Mitchell. The scheme, which affects the most important dune system on the west coast, was also sanctioned by An Bord Pleanala, even after the discovery of a rare snail, V.angustior, on the site.
"We seem to be afraid to say no to development in case the Celtic Tiger bubble bursts," says Shirley Clerkin, national co-ordinator of An Taisce. She describes our approach to conserving the natural environment as "bitty at best", with SACs accounting for less than 5 per cent of the State's land area, compared to 23 per cent in Denmark.
Ireland is in breach of the EU Habitats Directive over persistent delays in the designation of SACs. Only the least contentious of them have been approved so far, often involving State-owned land or sites where no development is pending. Strong opposition from the powerful farming lobby has obstructed progress on a more general front.
The designation of Natural Heritage Areas (NHAs), not quite as rigorous as SACs, has also been painfully slow, for the same reason. A long-promised amendment to the 1976 Wildlife Act giving NHAs legal status was finally published in July 1999 by the Minister for Arts and Heritage, Sile de Valera. More than a year later, it is still not through the Dail.
But even if all of these areas were protected, Clerkin insists that the idea of creating "little islands of wildlife" with no buffer zones around them is both piecemeal and tokenistic - especially if development is let rip outside their limited boundaries; even rivers, which should form natural wildlife corridors, are coming under serious pressure.
"What we're seeing is a total pandering to short-term economic gratification without regard to long-term consequences," says Ian Lumley, An Taisce's heritage officer. "The biggest single issue is the suburbanisation of the landscape, which is progressively eroding the difference between towns and villages and the countryside".
As for the fate of historic buildings, "the overwhelming trend is the destruction of real heritage and its replacement with mock heritage. Old buildings are losing original features such as slate roofs and timber sash windows to mock-Georgian plastic, even in designated heritage towns, with new buildings designed in the same bastardised style."
An Taisce is currently compiling a Buildings At Risk register, which reveals "the massive scale of loss and abandonment," according to Lumley. "Thatched houses and mill buildings are having a terrible time. Even State-owned schools and Garda stations have been hideously altered in breach of the Department of the Environment's guidelines."
Of the 390 buildings at risk on the Heritage Council's more limited register, only 12 received grant-aid last year, amounting to a total of £332,000. The largest single grant of £92,087 went towards restoring and re-thatching the Mayglass Farmstead, in south Wexford, which will soon be open to the public on a limited basis by appointment.
Altogether, £2,258,793 was paid out in grants by the Heritage Council during 1999 - down slightly from the previous year's figure. The paltry level of resources made available to the council can barely meet a fraction of the demands placed at its door. "Aspects of our heritage are undoubtedly being lost as a result," its chief executive, Michael Starrett, frankly conceded.
Given the Government's massive budget surplus, even the £4 million allocated for conservation grants under the 1999 Planning Act seems derisory. And while the uplifting of listed buildings to the status of "protected structures" is welcome, the listings done by local authorities - notably Limerick and Sligo corporations - are often full of gaps.
The Heritage Council's placement of heritage officers in nine local authorities should help. So will the anticipated publication by Sile de Valera later this year of a National Heritage Plan, spelling out for the first time an overall strategy to which all interested parties can subscribe. It may even change how Duchas operates.
After years of campaigning by Cork-based conservationist Terry O'Regan, the Heritage Council is drafting a national policy for the Irish landscape and hopes to put its main recommendations to the Government in October, including the adoption of a "landscape character assessment" approach in considering development proposals.
"Landscape is the hook on which all heritage can be hung, because it can then be looked at in all of its aspects, instead of having it in different boxes," says Paddy Matthews. Together with the National Heritage Plan, it should also assist in moving "heritage" further up the agenda of all the agencies whose activities have an impact on it.
Though the Heritage Council is caught up in a divisive row over plans to locate its headquarters to the Bishop's Palace in Kilkenny, its 1999 annual report was surely right in saying that the future of Ireland's heritage "must be entrusted to the people who live closest to it, those who have the deepest understanding and greatest awareness of it."
Whether it will survive the depredations of the "Celtic Tiger" is another matter.
National Heritage Week runs from September 3rd to 10th. For more information tel 1850-660601 or 01-6472466. The Duchas website is at www.heritageireland.ie
Tomorrow: From lighthouses to Loughcrew, Rosita Boland picks out some highlights of Heritage Week events
