Sir, - At a time when reading the newspaper is mostly depressing, it was a joy-making welcome change to read that An Bord Pleanala had, on appeal, overruled a grant of planning permission given by Kerry Co. Council for a development overlooking Ventry Strand. An Bord had got it right and blocked the spoiling of this special place where scenic beauty goes hand in hand with Gaelic culture and tradition. Had the development been allowed to go ahead, it would have constituted a classic case of deprivation of the many for the benefit of the few. We should be thankful (as indeed I am!) to the groups and individuals named in your report who fought and won this case and to An Bord Pleanala for their wise and far-seeing decision. Fate has given Kerry Co. Council the custody and guardianship of one of, if not the most beautiful, distinctive and culturally sensitive areas of this country. Their zoning of the Ventry area and the granting of the planning permission (now, thankfully, over-ruled) must raise serious questions as to their will and competence to fulfil this trust.
On a Sunday afternoon in early September last year, I walked in bright sunshine on Ventry Strand. Rasanna Naomhog (currach races) were being held. It had rained heavily all morning, but in the early afternoon the clouds gradually rolled away and the sun shone. Had I not been troubled by thoughts of the planning permission which had been granted by Kerry Co. Council for a development overlooking the strand where I was then walking, I might have thought that I had been granted a foretaste of paradise. "Here" I said to my wife, (I have a habit of mentioning this whenever we are in Ventry, but she is very patient) "Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna fought for a year and a day with Daire Donn, King of the World and all the hosts of the world" (Tomas O Criomhthain to Robin Flower as told in The Western Island by Robin Flower, OUP 1944). It is that kind of place: open yourself to it and it will reward you by putting its spell on you, so that time may become timelessness and myth may become real.
Golf courses, leisure centres etc., are destroyers of natural, wild countryside and farmlands, and are often the thin edge of the wedge for further, even more unsightly, destructive development. However fine the scenery may have been before such intrusions, neither tourists nor anyone else want to drive through a mirror image of suburbia or long stretches of bungalow blight. The lesson is that unless the activities of developers out for the fast buck are not severely restricted, irreversible damage will be done to our country. - Yours, etc.,
Ernest Breen,
Lower Newtown, Waterford.