It would be nice to be able to say that Peter Pearson's Between the Mountains and the Sea could not have been more timely, but I cannot say it. If this sumptuously wise volume had appeared 20 years ago, much of that part of south county Dublin which he has so lovingly chronicled in his pages would still exist today. Instead, his latest book must stand as an elegant and scholarly tribute to a wonderful part of Ireland now vanishing beneath an ocean of housing estates.
The perception has recently grown that we have seen the worst of the destruction of Dublin; that the conservation lobby has created a political consensus on the need to retain, restore and cherish the great houses of Ireland's former ruling caste. But that perception has been made cruelly false by a deadly combination of fine words, ("nowadays we all cherish our architectural heritage, mumble mumble mumble"), conservation-fatigue and an uncontrollable economic growth for which we were not politically nor psychologically prepared.
Religious orders
Simultaneously, there has been a collapse of the power of the Ascendancy's heirs, the Catholic religious orders which colonised so many of its mansions and lands in the 19th century. These religious are disposing of their properties onto a booming market which wants the land, but not the great buildings attached. With the demand for housing almost insatiable, who is going to stand and fight for the retention of apparently redundant, draughty and uneconomic old buildings?
When Peter was finishing his book last July he visited Redesdale House to check on a few architectural details - Redesdale being one of the last 18th-century houses in Stillorgan. But by the time he had finished writing his description of the house it had been demolished. Redesdale might stand for so many of the great houses of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown which are either gone or going; and the process seems unstoppable.
But there is another side to the prosperity coin and that is the emergence of a new class of people, energetic, awash with money, and keen to live in style and grace and space, as did the religious orders once did, and as had before them the Anglo-Irish; and maybe such people will now rescue the kinds of houses which in the past decade or so have been levelled, and which are best and most tragically (because needlessly) exemplified by the fate of Frascati House, the home of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, demolished in 1983 to make way for a ludicrously ugly store, courtesy of the Roches.
Important house
Peter quotes Mr Justice O'Hanlon in a ruling over the neglect of the house: "It appears to me to that the developers have been completely indifferent to, or perhaps even welcomed [my italics], this deterioration of the condition of the building and have done virtually nothing to halt it. I feel the developers have shown a complete disregard for [their] moral obligations." Two years later, those developers levelled one of the greatest and most historically important houses of Ireland. Seldom can municipal stupidity and a crass and otiose commercialism have so conspired to rob a nation of such a handsome monument to a man so revered as a patriot.
Despite the destruction of so much, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown remains truly fascinating, not least because of the sheer diversity of cultural and religious experience there; it has long been the most cosmopolitan part of Ireland, and it was where the transfer of power within the State became formalised territorially. There is no more potent symbol of the class consciousness of Irish life than the post-independence ardour with which the leaders of the new Ireland moved in and took over the cultural garrison of the ancien regime, as represented by "Kingstown" (which, indeed, it remained to some old loyalist stalwarts until quite recently).
It remains uniquely cosmopolitan, with Dalkey now becoming a Hibernian Monte Carlo, a Slieve Cathal in which a coal-scuttle is as valuable as entire tracts of the less-favoured regions of the capital. But it is not what it was. It cannot be genteel because gentility departed with the class that invented it, and the wildly improbable, unpredictable Ireland that has emerged in recent years means that when the current tumult has subsided, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown will probably have undergone an even greater change than that which occurred with the arrival of Catholic money in the last century and Catholic political power in this one.
Housing estate
Peter sees trends which should be resisted, but - to judge from our political will to date - will not be. Discussing the quite delightful house called Danesmote in Rathfarnham, he observes that the lower part of the property is now a housing estate and will soon be traversed by a motorway. With an almost heroic stoicism he adds: "The building of houses above the line of the Southern Cross is regrettable, as it allows the suburban sprawl to encroach on the Dublin mountains and slowly diminish the city's much-needed open space."
What was now is not, and what is will not be. It is the way of things. Yet some things do not alter. One is that we need Peter Pearsons to remind us not merely of what we have lost but what we still have yet still stand to lose. Between the Mountains and the Sea is a great labour of love from one of the great men of Irish life.