Dúchas claims visitor centres have protected sensitive sites from damage bytourists. Their critics disagree. Gordon Deegan reports.
With the construction of O'Brien's Tower at the highest point of the world renowned Cliffs of Moher in 1835, Cornelius O'Brien, a Clare MP, unwittingly started the country's fascination with visitor centres.
Built as an observation point for "strangers visiting the magnificent scenery of this neighbourhood", the tower is near the proposed site of a new visitor centre at the cliffs, which is refocusing the debate on the merits of such facilities.
The rush to build visitor centres was at its height in the early 1990s and many of those centres are seen by An Bord Fáilte today as a vital part of the country's tourist infrastructure.
The centres were financed in part through €204 million of Bord Fáilte-leveraged EU funding for developing natural and cultural tourism, under two successive operational programmes for tourism that ran to the end of 1999.
A spokesman for An Bord Fáilte has admitted that many of the visitor centres would never have seen the light of day without EU funding and acknowledged that a few of them had failed.
However, the spokesman pointed out that the interpretative centres give the visitor a far better presentation of the country's natural and built environment than before.
Dúchas, the Heritage Service, operates State-owned visitor centres at 70 sites. According to a spokesman the primary motivation for developing visitor centres is the conservation of the site, with the interpretation of the attraction coming second.
He said Dúchas was satisfied this has been achieved, adding that it has no plans to build any more centres. He said visitor numbers to each attraction were not critical, only the impact such numbers may have on the site.
However, in the case of Clonmacnoise in Co Offaly, which attracted 155,000 visitors in 2000, the development of a centre beside the early Christian site in 1992 has raised fears about the site's conservation appears to have contributed to a situation where Dúchas is now considering not promoting the site in future, in an effort to limit visitor numbers.
The proposed Cliffs of Moher centre is instructive of how attitudes have changed to visitor centres in a decade, with Clare County Council's one-time partners in the project, Shannon Development, now leading opposition against it.
The agency has told the council that international practice states that it should not develop Cliffs of Moher facilities for visitors at the site, but should build them in nearby settlements.
This is supported by Prof Emer Colleran of NUI Galway, who said it "is time to bite the bullet and move the centre away from the cliffs to avoid further environmental damage".
She said the impact of visitor centres "has been very mixed". "Some have genuinely fulfilled a visitor function and you get the sense that people are fed up with visitor centres, but for visitors who come into a strange town, they have lots of benefits."