Imminent decision that arrived on time

A FEW minutes walk from the centre of Killarney is the southwestern entrance to the National Park. You can walk through the iron gates, pass a small lodge and come to a fork. Turn right on a sharply rising path through a wood and, after about five minutes, you come to a clearing. From here, another path takes you up Knockreer Hill, and what must be one of the finest views in Ireland: Lower Lough Leine and Inishfallen Island, with Toomies Mountain on the far side and beyond it the peaks of Carrauntoohil.

You can do this whether or not you have money, whether or not you have friends in high places, whether or not you belong to any club or clique. It is public property, a collective inheritance in which we all share because, in the early 1970s, an enlightened landowner sold this place to the State for much less than its market value, in the belief that it would be preserved for the Irish people as a whole.

And in that sense it is more than a place in which to escape society. It is also a part of what underlies society itself - the sense that there are values beyond the individual and beyond the monetary. Those values are under threat everywhere, and it is not, perhaps, all that surprising that they should be so here as well.

On July 13th, 1995, Killarney Town Council gave permission to the Castlerosse Hotel for a ninehole golf course, which was to be developed on land owned by the hotel itself and some adjoining woodland owned by an American based businessman Denis Kelleher, and known locally as Kelleher's Wood.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Killarney Nature Conservation Group then appealed that decision. And at an oral hearing of the appeal, the course developer, Dr Arthur Spring, offered a new deal the privately owned woodland would be swapped for an area of the National Park around Knockreer Hill.

If this rings any bells, it may be because a similar proposal was made by Killarney Golf Club five years ago and eventually defeated after a fierce campaign by local environmental groups. Yet having seen off that attempt to privatise public property, the same arguments have now to be gone through all over again. The principle that seemed to be established then - that the National Park is not up for grabs - is again under threat.

AT the heart of the proposal this time is a simple but deeply dangerous notion. It is that there is a straightforward tradeoff between a parcel of lakeshore woodland currently in private hands on the one side and a parcel of the National Park on the other. It seems on the face of it a sensible enough notion - fair exchange is no robbery.

According to the developers, the land they are willing to swap, Kelleher's Wood, is "environmentally sensitive", so it is a good thing for the public that it should pass into public ownership: "The sections of trees, lakeshore and wet woodlands that would be transferred to the National Park were the subjects of vehement objection to the original golf course plan. The addition of these areas to the National Park represents a considerable ecological gain."

At the very worst, according to this argument, the public loses 22.7 acres of beauty and gains 23.4 acres of equal beauty. So what's the problem? The problem, in fact, is precisely the assumption that lies behind this very notion. For what is, in effect, being argued is that the private owners of environmentally sensitive lands have a right to be compensated for not destroying them.

Environmental responsibility is not to be regarded as a duty but as a commercial transaction. Caring for a place of great beauty is not to be a sacred trust but a calculation of self interest. The offer that is really being made is this: we will refrain from destroying a lakeshore wood if you, make it worth our while.

This contention has very wide repercussions. It affects the National Park, of course. It affects the whole programme of National Heritage Areas which the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht is trying to put in place, since the woods in question have been designated as a Special Area of Conservation under the programme. And it affects at a deeper level the balance between private property and the public interest that any civilised community needs to maintain.

No public body should ever concede the principle that the preservation of an environmentally sensitive landscape is negotiable. As An Taisce has pointed out, "there should never be any threat of Kelleher's Wood being developed at all - and no need of a swap to protect it". According to Dr Daniel Kelly, of the botany department at Trinity College Dublin, the area is "an important piece of natural shoreline and a significant refuge for flora and fauna".

WHY should it be necessary to hand over another part of our natural heritage (the Knockreer section of the National Park), in order to protect this one? Have we not reached a stage in our awareness of the environment where we believe we have a right to expect that places like Kelleher's Wood will be preserved, whether or not they are in public hands?

Though it is less important, there is also a question of money. Viewed as a purely commercial transaction, the proposed swap seems to make little sense. The land in the National Park has been valued independently at £120,000 an acre, the woodland in private hands at £4,000 an acre.

The effect of the swap, in other words, would be to give some private individuals a valuable piece of land in return for one with little commercial value. The temptation to talk about natural beauty as priceless should not be allowed to hide the fact that there is a very hardheaded commercial calculation at work here and the public will, if the scheme goes through, be the loser.

It might be imagined that the public is protected by the simple fact that the National Park is owned by a State agency, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and that it would dismiss such a proposal out of hand. Last February, however, the Minister in charge of it, Michael D. Higgins, announced that he was seeking public submissions on the proposed deal "so that a variety of views should be available to stimulate public discussion".

On Tuesday, the Department of Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht was unable to tell me anything about the Minister's decision on the deal except that it was "imminent". Last evening, just as we were going to press, the Department contacted me again to say that the Minister had made a decision yesterday afternoon - there will be no deal to swap National Park land.

It is a good decision for Killarney, for Ireland and for the rights of citizens. It also suggests that, if we want to protect the environment, we should have general elections more often.