Sir, - In his enlightening series, Frank McDonald rightly blames tourism for "putting pressure on the [Irish] landscape".
However, tourism is not entirely to blame for this, as a recent trip to the West confirmed. I was appalled at the inroads made into our beautiful native hedgerows by new housing developments. On minor and major roads the destruction is the same: huge gaps are being made in these hedges which are part of our heritage, are so useful for wildlife and so aesthetically pleasing. They really do blend well with the overall landscape.
Worse still, the hedges are being replaced by Leylandii hedges, timber railings, wire, block walls, banks of exotic shrubs and straight equidistant lines of foreign trees. As a result, the sight that meets the driver's eyes is a mish-mash of individualistic taste, a pot-pourri of bittiness. Road frontages where no thought is given to continual lines of hedgerow really look like bad mouthfuls of teeth.
We have only ourselves to blame for tolerating lax laws which allow this disconnectedness to prevail on our road frontages. - Yours, etc., Patrick Madden,
Tuckmilltown, Straffan, Co Kildare.