No amount of rhetoric will succeed in dispelling the fact that the concept of Europe was sold to the Irish people not through the language of culture but through that of hard economics. Europe, it seemed, at least to our residing chieftains, could only be understood when presented not as a conglomerate of richly contrasting cultures united by geography though divided by language and diverse perceptions, but as a vast purse offering unlimited cash subsidies. So, many years on, we are offered our heritage largely in terms of its market value. Heritage is a buzz-word, either a kind of grotesque hostage to pastiche plonked in a theme-park setting, or guaranteed to be an object of barter in yet another of those slap-on-the-back, "I knew your father well" styles of trade-off we are so good at.
After all, as we have collectively discovered, few things in life make a developer happier than being able to name his housing estate of anonymous houses, designed apparently with the intention of obliterating any lingering notions of a vernacular architecture, after the nearby castle, abbey or rath.
Now that heritage in our tourism economy is big business, with every possible aspect being exploited and/or distorted in the name of money ("because tourists love that sort of thing"), we are increasingly confused about what exactly heritage is and whether it is any longer remotely connected with culture or identity.
Landscape has increasingly become something that exists elsewhere. Every day witnesses more disputes: the bulldozer that razed a rath in Co Wicklow, a national monument and thereby supposedly protected under law; the removal of the screening-trees vainly attempting to conceal a modern hotel - that should never have been built - on the historic riverbank view facing Kilkenny Castle. We have to concede that if heritage is a legacy to be passed on to future generations we are all guilty of grand larceny. Hindsight may make for lofty regret but it is ultimately pointless.
Considering the conflicting views now surrounding development and that each new planning application is capable of dividing families, never mind communities, it can only be expected that any book entitled The Heritage of Ireland must be viewed with a measure of wary interest. My initial response was excitement. While no-one loves beautiful photography more than I do, there are more than enough gorgeous coffee table books reiterating the beauty of the setting sun over Dun Aenghus and the surreal Burren in full flower. The Heritage of Ireland is an ambitious, sparsely illustrated text-book, a reference work drawing on the interdisciplinarian post-graduate programmes in Heritage Management devised at University College Cork during the late 1980s. It quickly underlines the advantages as well as disadvantages of bringing together diverse, at times overlapping articles written by 82 contributors.
It also has to be said that, aside from some outstanding essays such as William Nolan's superb piece, Historical/Cultural Geography, Diarmuid O Murchadha and Kevin Murray on the fascinating subject of place-names, editor Neil Buttimer on the Irish language and fellow editor Colin Rynne (author of The Industrial Archaeology of Cork City and its Environs (Duchas, 2000)), whose contribution here, Industrial Archaeology is, as expected, excellent, this oddly inconclusive book is less an anthology and more a collection of curiously specific, if general - at times even random - lecture notes.
That said, Fidelma Mullane's precise and cautionary expose of our pathetic housing-design standards, the now ritual application of "lumpy stone" and the abuse of vernacular architecture should be compulsory reading for every county manager, every planning officer, every housing architect in the country.
"Ireland's vernacular architecture is disappearing from the landscape," she writes. "This is a type of architecture we have chosen to make redundant, practically. Beyond the rehabilitation of some traditional buildings, our creative energies should be directed towards the achievement of an understanding of the process of creation, inhabitation and demise of a complex architecture rather than investing efforts in halting its demise . . .
". . . We should be asking not how we can `save' traditional buildings, rather how we can bear witness to the departure of this extraordinary architecture and how we can be inspired by it to build a new and equally enduring rural architecture in the new Ireland." Mullane is also one of the very few contributors to use the word "imagination" - a word I would have thought vital to any discussion of heritage, our past, our future. Grellan Rourke draws on immense common sense, coherence and a case history, that of Ross Castle in Killarney, in his `Conservation and Restoration; the Built Environment'. "The historic monument is now not necessarily the individual building but its setting, be it a landscape or an urban environment," he writes. Restoration, he says, "has erroneously become synonymous with the preservation of historic structures, leading to the view that a building can only be preserved if it is restored".
Archaeologists Gabriel Cooney and Tom Condit, with environmental impact assessment expert Emmet Byrnes, argue convincingly on the need "to promote a management strategy which treats the whole country as an archaeological landscape". They stress the value of specifically identifying complexes of sites and monuments which can be designated as "archaeological landscapes".
I expected more on the environment, as well as a higher historical and particularly archaeological presence in the book. The riches of Ireland's Bronze Age, the most defined in Europe, the phenomenon of Irish monasticism, the miraculous engineering that created the round towers, the craft and genius of the high crosses are all central to Ireland's heritage, yet are not afforded in-depth discussion here. Similarly the achievement, even the individual entities of the Royal Irish Academy and the National Museum, merit examination - no project is providing a more detailed, consistent or coherent understanding of the layers of existence, settlement and culture underpinning Ireland's heritage than the Academy's ongoing Irish Historic Towns Atlas series.
Nolan does refer to the project and, in fairness to him, he fills many gaps in an essay that could deservedly fill an entire book. The role of the historical geographer is also well illustrated by him as he acknowledges our debt to Estyn Evans and the pioneering John Andrews, author of A Paper Landscape: the Ordnance Survey in nineteenth-century Ireland (1975) and Shapes of Ireland - Maps and their Makers 1564-1839 (1997).
PERHAPS I am naive, but I believe the surest route towards understanding Ireland must lie in an examination of its religions. Yet there is no discussion of them, nor is education looked at, nor is emigration. The editors concede this - but why, in a book this size, overlook issues at the heart of the culture while including pieces on "entrepreneurialism" and the design and layout of museum exhibitions? Section 2 of Part 3, Business Development, is deeply unsettling. Reading it leaves one feeling heritage is merely a commodity that must pay its way or disappear. Of far greater practical value in terms of heritage management is the Heritage Council's recently published Stone Monuments Decay 2000 for which a commissioned survey focusing on 112 selected stone monuments was carried out, addressing the particular erosion and degradation problems facing each.
Long before having, perhaps ill-advisedly, read through The Heritage of Ire- land's 695 pages of text including heavygoing, jargonised articles such as `Airline Deregulation and Tourism', `Enterprise Accountability and Accounting' and the mind-numbing `Basic Accounting' that begins: "In this chapter we shall look at the practical areas of accounting for heritage management. We examine financial statements, their component parts and the users of same, financial records, ratios, taxes and cash flow . . . It is recognised that not all persons involved in heritage management will have strong numeracy skills . . ." - long before arriving at `Heritage Marketing on the Internet', it has become clear that heritage, as far as the brief here is outlined, is a business, an industry, and that this book is geared for the training of heritage managers.
This explains the overview theme but does not bring us closer to an understanding of heritage. It appears unlikely that there was much discussion between the contributors. There was some commissioning, however, and definite attempts to embrace the North of Ireland have been made. Jonathan Bell of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum proves lively and informative on the theme of Folk Museums. But overall this is a Cork project, with a strongly Cork perspective.
There are multiple ironies in the fact Valerie C. Fletcher's entry on `The European Union and Heritage' is the longest, considering Ireland's dismal record in complying with the most standard requirements concerning the protection of our Special Areas of Conservation. One need look no further than the impending tragedy of Pollardstown Fen, an internationally recognised SAC in Co Kildare about to be massively undermined by the Kildare by pass.
The opening whistle-stop article, `The Natural Heritage' by Grace O'Donovan is disappointingly sketchy. The red squirrel - twice extinct in Ireland and now again in decline - could hardly be described as being "in abundance". Here, as elsewhere throughout this volume, an article is trying to deal with book-length subjects.
For such a hefty if uneven tome, The Heritage of Ireland adopts the strange approach of offering everything through the medium of management strategy, leaving notable omissions in its wake. Anyone attempting to explain or understand Ireland's heritage from a cultural rather than commercial viewpoint would be - Nolan, Rynne, Bell and other named exceptions aside - better served elsewhere. Defining any country's heritage is difficult. However, Reading The Irish Landscape (Mitchell and Ryan, Dublin, 1997) and David Cabot's Ireland (1999) come close. Ireland's heritage, having survived colonialism, now more than ever is in need of the shrewd genius of a Frank Mitchell.
The Heritage of Ireland, edited by Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin is published by The Collins Press, price £25 pb, £50 hb