ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: The sun before breakfast flashes off dew in the rushes, lambs in the meadow, magpies up poles. Across the wedge of aquamarine that points into Killary Harbour, it strikes the white gables of Weathershielded holiday houses strung out along the Connemara cliffs and then, towards Renvyle, crowding into dazzling clusters. I'm sure the people who stay in them think An Taisce is absolutely right about all the badly-planned strings of bungalows springing up in the west.
On our side of the bay, which is the view from Renvyle, the little white dots are much sparser, our rough and windy cul-de-sac of coast having quite missed out on the fashionable shades of Wilde and Gogarty. Between the turn of the road and the mountain, 10 new houses have been built in about as many years. Almost all have consolidated the existing farm community - young people getting married, building on family land and commuting to jobs 20 or 30 miles away; parents building again to hand their old house on to children; emigrant relatives coming home to retire.
Yes, a ribbon is forming with each new single building. Each spring sees another empty farm and house for sale, with significant mention of potential in its various "ruins". But for the moment, at least, our morning constitutional takes us from nesting stonechat to thrush to skylark with plenty of long gaps between front lawns.
Back in the late 1960s, at the time of the massive Buchanan Report on Growth Centres, planners still seemed excited about their potential for doing good. They were also sensitive and wary of their power, as I found when I edited the proceedings of the first all-Ireland conference on regional planning, held in Belfast.
"Planners must know," said the chairman, "how people want to live, how they want their houses to be arranged, what type of dwellings they want, what they can afford to pay for them, and so on." Others warned: "We must be careful not to let the countryside become a battleground for a whole number of vested interests, many of which evoke strong emotional undercurrents." Very briefly a member of An Taisce's national committee, I admired the way the North's planning laws seemed able to steer new rural building into existing villages and towns while keeping the countryside green. But then, much of the North was used to the "nucleated settlements" of industrial and mill villages, modelled on those of Britain.
The sprawling townland settlements of the west of Ireland, with their sprinkle of single farmhouses, have sprung from a different agrarian history and culture. Even the warmly crowded clachan, long thought some sort of ancient model of Irish settlement, turns out to have been a brief phenomenon of the pre-Famine population explosion.
Co Mayo has long been terra incognita to An Taisce, which has never had more than a tentative presence here. For as long as I have known the county, that organisation's image as a remote and culturally alien hobby of the urban middle-class has remained generally intact. Its recent policy confrontations over "one-off" rural housing have not improved matters. And by offering itself as a lightning-rod for cumulative rural resentments, it may have set back the general cause of conservation in the west by a decade or more.
Few people would argue with An Taisce's general thrust against urban sprawl. But its case against one-off rural housing has been ambiguous, and lacking in empathy for new rural realities. It favours housing for farmers and others engaged with the land, including agri-tourism. It favours restoring dilapidated "vernacular" ruins and development in villages and rural towns. What it opposes is "one-off housing for urban-generated commuters and holiday-homers".
Among commuters to new jobs in towns are farmers' children, adjusting to a future of part-time farming. What could be more natural and desirable than that they should build on family land, beside their parents, looking after them in old age, and helping to consolidate the community? An Taisce argues that the case for excepting sons and daughters "has been undermined by the amount of houses and sites being progressively sold off by indigenous landowners to accommodate holiday homes and second homes". But that calls for greater discrimination in the planning process, not the sweeping suspicion with which An Taisce seems to regard the farming community.
Co Mayo's electoral candidates have, of course, fallen over each other to defend the county against this latest interference from "Dublin 4". Fianna Fáil's Eamon Ó Cuiv is accused by An Taisce of representing the interests "of a vociferous vested minority who hope to farm sites as they once farmed agriculture". Such hope certainly exists, as a "strong emotional undercurrent" among small farmers who have no other assets in their lives, no other skills the world seems to want. And I cannot blame them for that hope, or for seeing injustice when it is thwarted for reasons that make no sense to them.
There has been injustice in rural planning ever since the first Act of 1963. Only a hugely costly, endlessly exploitable system of State compensation for loss of development rights could have balanced such enforcement of "public good" in allowing building here but not there . When the good seems determined by predominantly urban taste in landscape, no wonder the instinct to deceive and outwit authority is given an extra edge.
More than 30 years on from that first all-Ireland regional planning conference, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland has now called on the next government to establish a forum on rural housing, with solutions to the "one-off" problem as a priority.
It is, indeed, about time we got it sorted - and in the right frame of mind. I fear that An Taisce has offered a stick with which to beat environmental planning of all kinds, including that of land use for nature conservation. The repercussions are likely to be felt by a wide range of people, from the new county council heritage officers and Dúchas conservation rangers to the ordinary rambler on the hill.