Forgotten landscape

This is an old story, perhaps one of the oldest. A man returns to a place that once made him happy. He spent a few isolated weeks of boyhood there. He is not so naïve to believe that the old place will still exist after 30 years. There is a certain thrill to the idea that the place will have changed, an expectation of some damage, or even a thought that imagination will have creeped, benignly, into his memory. Nobody ever really goes back anywhere – inevitably we carry our changed selves with us.

But when he gets there, to this old place, the west of Ireland, it is so utterly different that, for a moment, he can hardly recognise it at all. He looks around, flailing, for any old rock or stone that he once flipped over. Eventually he will find some small place, a beachhead, or a schoolhouse corner, or a gatepost, that will make him comfortable, but in the initial flush of seeing the roadways of his past, he feels nothing but sadness.

So this, then, is a story about sadness. I cannot claim that I know that much about planning, or the economics of rural life, or the vagaries of town politics, or what it might be like to have a future wrapped up in a parcel of land, but I do know that I drove the western coastline of Galway and Mayo last week and the landscape was so utterly changed that it seemed allergic to the joys of itself. So much of it was gone.

As we drove, a friend turned to me and said that it looked as if a dive-bomber had swooped in from beyond and dropped cluster bombs of bungalows, sheds, cinder blocks. We ventured from Galway, to Spiddle, Carraroe, Baile na hAbhann, Rossaveel, Clifden, Roundstone, Cleggan, Louisburgh, all the way up to Achill Island. For enormous stretches the eye was simply not allowed to rest. It was like being in a pinball machine of whitewash the eye wanted to move away from it but everywhere seemed interupted. Holiday cottages stood in preposterous shapes high on the hills. Prominent bungalows seemed embarrassed by themselves. Mansions loitered on the waterfront. Absurd structures sat primly on the loveliest of hills. No thought of hedgerows, tree-screens, sight contours. It all seemed so arbitrary. Out of place. Disfiguring.

Okay, so I'm a city boy now living in New York, and I should keep my mouth shut and quit whining. What right do I have to make a claim on the landscape where I spent a couple of summers in the Gaeltacht? But it pained me. So many of the lines of communication with the past were ruptured. The landscape took on the attitude of an old boxer – overdressed, punchdrunk, nostalgic for a time it could not even remember. Gone. Dead. Ruined.

According to recent figures there could be 100,000 new homes built this year. The rate of construction is unprecedented for any western economy. Most of the building is around Dublin, which people seem to accept as a disaster anyway, but a large part of the west of Ireland has become a theme park for urban weekenders and blow-ins, like myself, who rant about the romantic past. There are issues here, of course, that are deeply ambiguous. There are politicians, developers, builders, architects, planners, farmers, housewives, theorists, academics, immigrants, and each of them know many of the answers and certainly all of the excuses. It's about integration. Modernisation. Secularisation. Tax-breaks. A whole new economy.

But it's also about pissing a heritage away. It's like a life of paying the bills. Some day we wake up and say: Why did I do that? The plain fact of the matter is that so much of what we are is in the process of ignoring what we once were.

The landscape of a country is a human creation too. The fields and even the rivers are shaped by us. One of the most important things about Ireland now is to capture the sense of what we have lost and replace it with something more meaningful than a soulless set of bungalows. We are creatures of our time and place. Generations to come will look back at what we are now doing and wonder how we could possibly have allowed it. And it's not just the West, it's Tara, Glendalough, Carrickmines, Killarney, and, in truth, the whole outskirts of Dublin also ( though Dublin seemes to deserve it sometimes, it's like a swaggering adolescent diseased with talk of traffic and mortgages).

For five short days I travelled the length of the Galway and Mayo coasts and I talked to a good few locals who felt outraged by what had happened to their countryside. They had tried to rescue old ruins but could not. They had tried to fit houses into the landscape but planning permission had been denied. They tried to block certain developments but they were threatened with being burned out. Burned out. A peculiar resignation had settled in on some of them, like ash. They shrugged and said how terrible it was, but that nothing could be done, the politicians, the developers and the planners were in it together, covered in the steamy bedsheets of the euro.

But, lest we forget, politics is the sum total of everything the politicians don't want us to hear. All stories have to be told over and over again. There are pockets of such spectacular beauty around this country that simply must be saved. It can be said no plainer than that.

Harold Brodsky once wrote that the darkness restores what the light cannot repair. Our darkness is still a long way off. So much of what we hold onto is awe-inspiring, and there are places where we can feel restored, at peace, and at fond angles to our own pasts. It's not about going forward. It's about holding on.

At one point I walked down by the beach in Roundstone in Galway. Near a graveyard that fronts the seascape, I heard a high sound, like a moan, or a distorted tune. It was, in fact, a row of aluminium tubes that went to make up the fence. The wind was catching in them and swirling and singing. It was a beautiful sound, haunting and desperate, and continued long after I had stepped across the fields and away.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy RTE 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night