Brochures for holidays abroad so often show golden sands and blue clear water to tempt you into the surf. Yet here in Ireland, a present has just recently arrived of a book showing seemingly endless golden beaches and water as blue or as blue-green as the most lavish of travel handouts. It is Ireland - Our Island Home, large format and 158 pages. It is described on the cover as an aerial tour of Ireland's coastline and the photographer is Kevin Dwyer. Your reaction may well be: "I didn't know our island was as beautiful and inviting as that."
It was the colour of the seas and the brilliance of the sand that first struck on a run-through. The cover alone is a new view of Derrynane, O'Connell's old place near Caherdaniel: the rocks, the sand - that's one of the surprises, that in so many places the sand stretches so far out beneath the water - and the brilliance of water. What spot on the Mediterranean could equal it? Apart from the temperature!
It's all done in orderly fashion. He starts with the coastal counties of Leinster, and you haven't seen Courtown and Rosslare until you've looked at Kevin Dwyer's pictures. And no wonder the Normans landed at Duncannon (didn't they?): this is a lovely composition of fort, harbour, but above all beach. On to Munster and, of course, it's not all beaches, but towns, harbours and monuments - as in Ardmore, with the round tower and St Declan's Well. Cork, Cobh and Blarney, of course. And everywhere, even in the smallest places you want to adapt Anthony Powell's phrase: yachts do furnish a harbour. Kinsale especially. Yes, Munster gets a lot of space. You wouldn't grudge a picture of Inch strand. And the Blaskets can be looked at for a long time.
After the Cliffs of Moher we are into Galway, with the Aran Islands given their due, and a misty view of all three from the east. Roundstone, Clifden Bay with salmon farm; Inishbofin in a dark blue sea and we're only at page 116 out of 158. Donegal is well done and the sandy estuary at Ards Bay has to be seen to be believed.
One suggestion: would he extend his next edition (this is the second printing this year) to give us a few of the more spectacular beaches in Antrim and Down? But thanks, anyway. This was a present and the price removed. The Collins Press, Cork.