Burren Law School: The ongoing "fretting and fussing" over one-off housing is a very superficial symptom of a much greater and far deeper change - the collapse of agriculture in Ireland, the Burren Law School was told at the weekend. Gordon Deegan reports.
Mr Conor Skehan of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) told the annual school at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan: "By 2015 productive agriculture in Ireland will be confined to a narrow band stretching from north Munster to southwest Leinster.
"Outside of this area all agriculture will be part time, specialist and secondary." He said: "Very extensive areas will cease to be farmed, the more productive lowland soils being used for forestry, the rest will naturally return to woodland cover.
"Across large swathes of the Irish countryside this generation will witness something that hasn't happened for 6,000 years. For the first time since the late stone age the tree canopy will close out the sun and the sky from the ancient fields and meadows. It has begun already." He went on: "This is just the visible change. Another change is afoot that is just as profound, but much more difficult to see. Control of the countryside is changing hands. Not the ownership, just the control.
"Since the first settlement, the organisation and appearance of the countryside has been determined by agricultural practices. The collapse of agriculture as the organising paradigm is leading to a vacuum which is rapidly being filled by other systems of organisation."
Mr Skehan said that "today's landscape is increasingly controlled by ideas and beliefs". He said: "The landscape is becoming a place to receive and reflect the value systems of an increasing urbanised European population. These value systems are scientific - ecological designations - and aesthetic - scenic areas and drives, national parks.
He went on: "The landscape is beginning to become a patchwork quilt of designations which determine where and how the land uses of the future will be arranged.
"It will be a very new landscape, one that is emerging very haphazardly as a result of the well-intentioned but uncoordinated imposition of such designations.
"These problems are rapidly becoming apparent and there are already signs of the emergence of a 'planned landscape' in Ireland.
"Currently those involved in large-scale planning, and they are pitifully few and ill-prepared, proceed in the belief that a plan will 'emerge' from a synthesis of such designations with an emerging raft of other legislation and guidelines."
He said: "For too long planning in Ireland has been able to survive by passing off prevention and protection as issues of substance. It won't be enough to say what we don't want. We will need to be much more proactive and positive to make provision for the wide range of existing and new uses that will want to use the countryside - windfarming, forestry, water management, rural housing, mineral extraction, infrastructure, to name only a few."
On who is planning for the countryside, Mr Skehan said: "No existing planning at county, regional or national level has any coherent positive vision for the countryside after agriculture.He said: "If we care about the countryside, if we want some continuity with our past, we must deepen our thinking."
In his address, environmentalist Prof Frank Convery noted the importance of the tourism industry in Ireland and expressed surprise that the "tourist industry in Kerry has been so passive in the context of the collapse of the planning system there".
He said: "It is a dog that doesn't seem to want to bark."