It was very sad to read in last Saturday's Irish Times Magazine about the death of romantic Leitrim. I would have gone to the funeral if I'd known. Unfortunately the first I heard of it was the playwright Michael Harding's poignant farewell to a place that he and other artists had "created, or invented, or imagined" in the early 1990s, writes Frank McNally.
They were a "scruffy concoction of creative types", he wrote, including hippies, retired academics, and "refugees from the civil service". But their short-lived bohemian idyll had been destroyed by property investors - attracted in part, ironically, by the image the artists helped to create. Holiday homes were now springing up "like mushrooms". Carrick-on-Shannon was being transformed "into a garish Kinsale of the north". In short, Mr Harding concluded, he was moving to Mullingar.
I'll leave it to the people of Leitrim - like that letter writer over there - to comment on the plight of rural communities which find themselves suddenly reinvented by artists (often without planning permission). But the reported demise of Leitrim reminds me of a small incident that happened in Leinster House a couple of years back, which I'll share with you.
It was at a time of national soul-searching about ribbon development and, looking for a particular Dáil debate on the subject, I carried out a word search on the Oireachtas website. I can't remember the words used - probably "bungalow" and "destruction of rural Ireland". Whatever they were, the archive selected a debate in the Seanad rather than the Dáil. But since the content was exactly what I wanted, I read on.
The debate followed the second reading of a new planning bill. It was clearly from a few years earlier, because the "Minister for Local Government" introduced the legislation. Yet from his opening comments, when he said that the serious traffic problems in Ireland's cities were "largely due to the uncontrolled growth of these areas in the past", it was obvious the material had not dated.
The senators generally welcomed the bill, while lamenting the damage already done by urban sprawl. Wicklow was a bad case, they agreed. The minister himself had just received representations from residents near the Sugar Loaf, complaining about "disfigurement of the neighbourhood by the indiscriminate erection of buildings". Once lost, they warned, the area's beauty "could never be restored".
But there were many such cases. Members spoke of the erection of mock "Tudor" monstrosities in the countryside, of disregard for local materials and building styles, of a complete absence of beauty in modern architecture. Developing the theme, one speaker complained about "terrible polyglot work, revolting to all the artistic senses".
Then a senator called O'Farrell really cut loose. "Irish towns and villages, with few exceptions, are unsurpassed for ugliness in any country in Western Europe," he began. The exceptions were small villages that had once been under the patronage of enlightened landlords. "But, in the main, ugliness is the predominating feature: drabness, monotony and a general departure from everything that is beautiful and artistic.. .
"In Dublin," the senator continued, "we have evidence of chaos and ugliness on every side." The classic example was Rathmines Road: "Everything that is characteristic of ugliness is contained in that one area." Every garden had "a hideous little shop or a temporary structure in front", so that what was once a "well-appointed residential district is now one of the most miserable semi-residential and semi-commercial areas that could be found in any city".
As for the suburbs, he fumed, we had seen "the desecration of beauty spots like Howth, the Vico Road, Dalkey, and seaside places like Donabate, where they are now building kiosks and bungalows just as if they were dropped from heaven".
Around this point, something odd struck me about the exchanges. It wasn't just that I didn't recognise the names of any contributors - that often happens in the Senate. It was the uncharacteristic silence of people such as David Norris, Shane Ross, and Joe O'Toole. Were they out sick that day, I wondered? Or was it possible that this debate, contemporary as it sounded, predated them? That's when I scrolled back to the top and discovered that it had occurred in April 1934.
It is always tempting to think that change began only after we arrived. As it happens, I lived in Rathmines back in the late 1980s, a refugee from the civil service, drawn by the cheap rents and the vibrancy of the hideous little shopfronts that (as I thought) had been unchanged since time began. The people I moved among were scruffy creative types. Scruffy, anyway. But the task of reimagining Rathmines was too much for us, so we concentrated on reimagining the dingy bedsits we were living in instead. It seemed to work for a while. Then, sure enough, property prices started rising and we were forced out.
It's the people who reinvented Temple Bar that I feel sorry for. They too probably felt they had discovered a safe artistic haven, from which they could hellenise Ireland. But even then the sands were shifting under their feet and a tidal wave of tourism was about to break over them. Nothing ever stays the same (except for Oireachtas debates). It's just sad. And if there's any uplifting conclusion we can draw from all of this, it's that now might a good time to buy property in Mullingar.