No great link to the old sod

The name de Valera pops up in enough different corners of Irish field studies to suggest quite a rounded family view of culture and heritage. It was Dev himself who, as Taoiseach in the 1930s, approved funding to the Royal Irish Academy for the first proper palaeobotanical study of how the peatlands developed. He even came to peer into the excavations in Ballybetagh bog, south of Dublin.

His son Ruaidhri was an archaeologist, an expert on the Neolithic tombs of the west. He excavated Behy tomb on the hillside of the Ceide Fields but missed, as it happened, the buried network of Stone Age walls all around him. And daughterMairin was a botanist who tramped the shores of Galway Bay in the 1950s to provide a topography of all its seaweeds.

Bertie Ahern's choice of Dev's granddaughter Sile, as a minister with both culture and nature in her bulky brief, and of grandson Eamon O Cuiv as her junior, was plausible enough. Why then, when Sile de Valera chose recently to express her angst about the influence of the EU on Irish affairs, did many people concerned for nature begin to feel an unease of their own?

What did she mean when she said "directives and regulations agreed in Brussels can often seriously impinge on our identity, culture and traditions" and that the Brussels bureaucracy doesn't always "respect the complexities and sensitivities of member-states"?

It speaks for her public priorities in office that very few commentators thought to look for the answer in the European directives and regulations that have given the minister and her party most trouble: namely, those to do with nature conservation. She seems not to want to volunteer any public enthusiasm for nature - or, indeed, to discuss it much at all.

"The putting in place of the structures for protection of the natural heritage and biodiversity in Ireland has been slow to progress." This is the judgment not of any EU document, but the Millennium Report on Ireland's Environment from the Environment Protection Agency. It singles out the years of delay in notifying Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) to the European Commission under the Habitats Directive.

The finalising of SACs is many years late, dragged out in negotiation between Duchas, the heritage service, and affected farmers in fixing the site boundaries. Beyond the endless explanatory public meetings, 200,000 letters to rural households and the haggling over objections and appeals, has come lengthy negotiation of a compensation package with the farming organisations. Of Duchas's direct spending on nature conservation - almost £25 million last year - some £20 million is spent to compensate landowners (this without any increased public access).

The five Irish NGOs concerned with wildlife and conservation (An Taisce, BirdWatch Ireland, Coastwatch Europe, Irish Peatland Conservation Council and Irish Wildlife Trust) have been deeply suspicious of the "informal" appeal procedures used so far, calling for independent judgment and transparency, with decisions made on scientific grounds alone.

They are also incensed by the number of protected areas, and have sent Europe their own "shadow" list of proposed SACs - almost 600, compared with the 400 contemplated by Duchas (many already protected in national parks).

Many farmers, of course, are fiercely resentful of "being told what to do on my own land" - a belligerence often masking real but unnecessary fears for their livelihoods and ownership. If they are already in REPS (the Rural Environment Protection Scheme), their agreed management plan already looks after most conservation aspects, with extra payment for any special restrictions. If they are not, then it's a matter of "notifiable actions" - asking the minister for permission before doing any one of a whole list of things that might damage a particular habitat such as sand-dunes, saltmarsh, blanket bog, limestone pavement or whatever.

No doubt the small farmers of France or Spain are just as suspicious of regulation, and have their own histories of agrarian struggle to justify a prickly identity. And it is understandable that two de Valera grandchildren based in the west should feel a special empathy with small-farm problems, especially in their own constituencies in Clare and Galway West.

When Sile de Valera throws the word "traditions" into the equation, she may also be thinking of the midland small farmers she has allowed to go on cutting turf (by hand) from raised bogs protected under SAC designation. It will obviously do neither of the deputies, or their party, much harm to seem to be sharing the farmers' mistrust of the EU's policies for nature - this despite the very real benefits of REPS for the environment and the farmers themselves.

The scientific basis of nature conservation can sometimes make its own difficulties - rare snails the size of pin-heads do not capture a lot of public sympathy when roads or jobs are at stake. Ecology needs to be backed by a common-sense promotion of its aims, not just passively or grudgingly accepted. But, on Sile de Valera's public agenda, nature has come a poor second to the arts.

Amendment of the Wildlife Act, 1976, originally promised for 1991, is still not enacted. It is needed to give legal protection to the 1,100 Natural Heritage Areas from which the SACs were chosen, and to extend conservation of species.

As the EPA Millennium Report pointed out, inadequate wildlife data is still "a serious problem" in Ireland, for all the somewhat piecemeal surveys carried out for Duchas. There is no biological records centre in the Republic since An Foras Forbartha was scrapped, and thus no consistent basis on which to assess and map the island's biodiversity.

The EC Birds and Habitats Directives and the EU directive on Environmental Impact Assessment have fixed most of the structures and standards for nature conservation in Ireland. They stem from expert scientific consensus, uncorrupted by national politics and sectional interests, and take the wider view of what is precious in Europe's surviving natural habitats.

They may not fit, at times, with the Irish way of doing (or not doing) things, but without them how far would conservation have come in the face of the darkly suspicious bull of farmer power?