Six million tourists annually by the end of next year, and eight million by the year 2004: these are the ambitions of Bord Failte's chief executive, John Dully. Which merely prompts the question: has nobody thought of locking this man up?
Maybe then we could close down the tourist industry before it goes mad completely and decides to construct nuclear-powered swimming pools in every county, and heliports at the Ceide Fields and Newgrange, and a plutonium-recycling plant to steal business from Sellafield (Britain's biggest tourist attraction), and maybe water-slides down the Cliffs of Moher and a grand-prix track through the Burren, and loads of water sports facilities, with jet-ski dromes in every bay in West Cork, and theme parks everywhere celebrating Ireland's great artistic heritage, with little Albanian and Rumanian colleens in Celtic dresses warbling about Ze Kerry Donces and Ze Vocky Voad du Dobbelin, all the native females having become commodity brokers who drive Porsches and smoke Marlboro Lite and, talking in loud American, discuss the respective merits of their vibrators over latte and capuccino in imitation-Paris cafes.
Fabric of life
But in fact, we do not need tourism to destroy the fabric of life in Ireland - we are doing a tolerably good job of that ourselves, thank you. But millions of blue-rinses sitting in busqueues in Connemara, or doing the tourist hop-step-and-jump through Cashel before being heel-snapped by specially-trained tourist sheepdogs back into the coach in time to join the three-hour traffic jam in Kildare town, or the herd of pensioners from Dayton, Ohio cantering briskly through Christ Church - they too are doing their bit and that's all we can ask of them.
The modest correspondence which this column attracts is these days invariably focused on one theme: the ruination of the Irish countryside by a bungalow blizzard. Town after town, village after village, is being besieged by armies of strip development whose individual units appear to have been assembled in the dark using house-building kits from different countries and different cultures. Daylight comes, and what do we see? Why look, Georgian glazing bars on many windows, though not on the huge airport plate glass facing the main road. But the south wall - the one overlooking the green valley, the remaining lush green unfields, unspoilt by development of any kind - why, that has no window at all.
Beside the front door - which is sort of Connecticut, with strong elements of Milton Keynes - are two Victorian carriage lamps, within a large Spanish arch. The oaken beams beside the arch speak of Elizabethan England, with a hey nonny no. Despite the presence of the arch, the builders have, with the thoroughly imaginative ingenuity of their kind, managed to install an ante-bellum Corinthian portico, which, despite its resonances of old Virginia, also manages to convey a strong hint of the Barney Eastwood school of architecture.
Special features
Of course there are many special features which make this property so desirable: the concrete balustrade along its length are early Cement Roadstone, the bottle-end window panes in the hallway are pure Cotswold, and the mock stone cladding manages to convey the rude simplicity of the labourer's dwelling house. The little fountain in the front garden is Florence at its most beguiling, and the massed array of pastel begonia, why they could be Switzerland, yodle-odle-eeee. And finally, the double-garage which is, deliberately, the house's most visible feature, why that is pure Essex bank-robber.
A central aesthetic which might have strangled these vast creations before sunrise apparently does not exist. Everywhere, from Oughterard to Rosses Point, from Castlebar to Dunfanaghy, from Enfield to Courtown, architectural atrocities litter our countryside. We have favoured the house-in-every field school of rural planning; and by the time we have reached the glorious figure of eight million tourists in a year, there will hardly be left in the Republic a single field unfavoured by some assembly or other of turrets, porticos, arches, mock cladding, Tudor beams and numerous concrete thingummies.
Close the ports
These risible creations are reasons to close our ports and imitate Albania under Enver Hoxha. We should be making tourism a capital offence and publicly garrotting planners and Bord Failte officials in Merrion Square. Instead, it seems, the State is urging foreigners to come and witness our self-destruction. "This long suburban roadway reminds you of Hollywood Hills, does it? Why thank you very much. That's a mighty compliment. These days we call it Tuscany Wolds, but in the bad old days, it was called the Glen of Aherlow, not a bungalow anywhere. But now, glory be, there are bungalows as far as the eye can see; Bella Vista, and Avonview, and Belair, and Napoli Chilterns, and the Hootenanny Hoedown Corral" (yee ha).
What we are doing is irreversible; we are pillaging a delightful landscape and remorselessly destroying communities and their local cultures right across the country. Isolation seems to confer no immunity; the virus must have been spread by crop-spraying aircraft. Central political will seems unable to police, control or inhibit the construction of the loud and the ludicrous every 50 yards or so. We might indeed have eight million tourists a year by 2004; but they will probably just come to laugh.