A sense of deep disturbance lingers around the Cliffs of Moher. People remember seeing the tourist bus that bore Eileen Murphy and her little son Evan passing by on the narrow roads last Tuesday and thinking what a lovely day it was for a trip to the cliffs, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Spring was stirring, the storms were gone, and the pure sea light illuminated the formidable rocks. They remember the shock of hearing on the radio that a young woman and her child had drowned off the cliffs.
They turn over in their minds the various contradictory stories of what happened. They try to imagine what thoughts might have been festering in Eileen Murphy's head as she sat on the bus. They will never know.
The one thing that they do not find mysterious, however, is that those thoughts might have focused on the Cliffs of Moher. If you were haunted by the sense of an ending, if you felt yourself to be on the borderline between life and death, then you would feel the power of this place. It is one of the world's most awful margins. The abrupt, harsh and vertiginous confrontation between land and ocean has an elemental force.
Yet it is also a strangely comforting location. Here, you can look at the end of the world and turn away from it. How many people, you wonder, have come here down the centuries with dark thoughts of self-destruction in their minds and then, faced with the sheer finality of that terrible drop, turned back towards life?
This experience lies in the irrational realms of magic, but it is sufficiently meaningful to make the Cliffs of Moher, with a million visitors a year, the most magnetic site in Ireland. All the more disturbing, then, that the magic failed last week, that instead of looking into the abyss and drawing back, Eileen Murphy succumbed to it. If you were inclined to look for omens, this would be a terrible one, for the official opening of the new Cliffs of Moher visitor centre will be performed later this week.
The Cliffs of Moher are no more - they have been replaced by the "Cliffs of Moher Experience". The elemental force has given way to entertainment value, the unknowable has been tamed by earnest education.
In one of the finest poems of the 20th century, the American poet Wallace Stevens articulated the psychic, spiritual force of the place. He wrote of the Cliffs of Moher "rising out of the mist,/ Above the real,/ Rising out of present time and place, above/ The wet, green grass./ This is not landscape,/ full of the somnambulations/ Of poetry/ And the sea. This is my father/ or, maybe,/It is as he was,/A likeness, one of/ the race of fathers: earth/ And sea and air." But the cliffs don't rise above the present time and place anymore. They have been successfully reduced to our moment, our concerns.
Over the last few years, Clare County Council has spent €31.5 million on the "Cliffs of Moher New Visitor Experience". Coming from the car park now, you see a big glass wall on your right, soon to have shops behind it. Then there's the new visitor centre, cut into the hillside, with toilets, restaurants, a first aid centre and more shops. Its centrepiece is a high-tech exhibition area, with interactive projections, touch screens, video games in which you can pretend to be a shark, a submarine-themed kiddies' play area, and aerial films of the Clare coastline. The climax is a multi-screen, computer-generated film that, as the hand-out puts it, "allows visitors to stand on the very edge of the cliffs on a simulated summer day".
With the virtual reality cliffs and the simulated weather, there is scarcely any need to step outside into unpredictable wind and disturbingly awesome sights. And if you do, there are customer service agents, Cliffs of Moher rangers, maintenance operatives and a total of 100 staff to look after you. It is all slick, polished, highly professional, impressively engineered and utterly soulless.
This busyness, this noise, this sensory overload, this rich opportunity to buy stuff, gives you everything you could possibly want except what the cliffs have given people for centuries - the feeling of confronting something beyond yourself, something harsh and strange that tempers your soul and helps you to feel alive. You can be entertained, mildly educated, fed, relieved and gently parted from some money. You cannot be moved. You can be a visitor, a tourist, a customer. You cannot be a human being confronted with the savage power of the physical world.
Maybe this is what we want now, and maybe there is no other way to process tourists in safety and comfort. But maybe too there is a price to be paid for a world in which every experience is neatly packaged and nothing is allowed to be mysterious. Maybe there is a psychic need that cannot be met by touch screens, a voice in the head that cannot be stilled by commentaries and cash registers. The edge is a dark and dangerous place but if we deny its existence, are we not more likely to fall over it?