Need the hand of man rest so heavily on Lough Key as it visibly and audibly does? Is it not possible, at the end of the 20th century, that the Irish people, through their State, might guard and cherish it with the care and delicacy it deserves? Lough Key truly is a wondrous place - was and is and will be - but only if public servants behave with a discerning vigour which is certainly not in evidence, not alone in Lough Key, but throughout much of the greater Shannon internal waterways. As tourism reaches unprecedented levels, and as more and more Irish people are able to afford a boat, the good old days of happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire, self-regulating boat management are gone. A new waterways management system must be policed and made effective - the very opposite of what seems to be happening now.
The length and the breadth of the Shannon, boats are being left illegally for months on end at public moorings. In the days when others were not competing for such moorings, that did not count. It counts now. Empty boats which might not have been visited through the season are permanently berthed, while cruisers with people on board hunt desperately for somewhere to spend the night.
Little notes
Often enough the criminal-boats have a little note attached to them - no doubt spurious - declaring that long-stay mooring has been authorised by a particular person in authority.
No individual has the right to cause such inconvenience to the ordinary users of the Shannon on behalf of friends or acquaintances. Yet it is clear there is no policing system on the Shannon. Boats are not hauled out of the water from moorings where they rest for months on end. No threat of fine or cruiser-clamping awaits those who abuse the public waterways of Ireland, where the writ of Me Fein still seems to run.
Not merely me feinery triumphs here; so too does that other ancient national characteristic, the existence of unobeyable laws. It is the law of the internal waterways that boats now put sewage into their own internal tanks and pump it out into specially designated sewage storage depots. But this last summer, the depot tanks have been full. People have been cruising the Shannon in great powered slurry vats, desperately looking to unload: the merest wave would send the most delightful jets of sewage vertically up through the flaps on the WCs. Those sitting on the toilets at the time may be visited once a month in St Pat's, though no hope is entertained for their recovery.
Friends of mine visited some half-a-dozen central storage tanks for slurry. Only one was not full - and the place for unloading boatpoo was occupied by a cruiser whose owner/occupier insisted she was a friend of the self-same individual who name is repeatedly uttered in exoneration of semilegal and certainly anti-social behaviour; and she refused to move. Yet such was the courtesy of my friends that they did not hose her down with bilgedung.
Lough Key wind-farms
Unless the cruisercrap dispositions are improved, my friends are thinking seriously about reinserting the device they not long ago removed - a sewage disposal system which empties directly into the river. They do not want to do this: on the other hand, they do not want to have to perform the Australian crawl through yesterday's breakfast to get to the galley for today's.
The concern is not just for the Shannon. On Lough Key, various forces are coming together to damage a truly magnificent lake and park. On the gentle hills to the west of the lake, vast wind-farms have sprouted: ugly, gaunt things which can make a dreadful noise 24 hours a day. On Lough Key itself, as on the Shannon generally, there seems to be no legal inhibition on speedboating or water-skiing: and in the magnificently tranquil surroundings of our inland waterways, power-boats are like electric guitars being added to a Chopin nocturne.
Coillte has responsibility for Lough Key Forest Park; yet ivy grows on many of the old trees there. Ivy is deadly for deciduous trees; like the wind-farms above them, it catches the midwinter winds which would otherwise pass through the bare branches of the host trees, which are then plucked from the ground. Donadea wood in Kildare - also Coillte-run - last winter lost half-a-dozen fine but ivy-covered old beeches in the high wind. Is it Coillte's brief to let ivy grow at the expense of standing wood?
Berlin watchtowers
And in all of Europe, there could hardly be a more deplorable public building than the monstrous reinforced-concrete Moylurg viewing tower overlooking the lake: it is a barbarous echo of the watchtowers which supervised the Berlin Wall, and which had ugliness as an intimidatory purpose. What purpose has Moylurg, other than to reassure us that whatever visual brutality a totalitarian state could manage under German communism, a free state can manage equally well in an Irish democracy?
Perhaps the tower was constructed to distract attention from the nearly as vile glass-fronted and wholly vulgar viewing pavilion and cafe which successfully takes up nearly 100 yards of waterfront. A bulldozer should be taken to the lot of them; but which State agency can we trust to do that? Which state agency can we trust to police the Shannon honestly and fairly? Does the answer sound like a religious lady in a wimple?