Environmental attitudes, community development, and local politics in Ireland

Abstract

Anyone who has ever visited Ireland will be immediately struck by the natural beauty of the country. From the rugged uplands of the west, the golden beaches of Cork and Kerry, the rolling drumlins of the midlands to the sea cliffs of the north, Ireland is undoubtedly blessed with one of the richest and most diverse environmental endowments in Europe. Attracted by tourist brochures and advertisements which play heavily on images of Ireland as a rural paradise, tourists flock to the country each summer in their hundreds of thousands, hoping to discover the pristine, unspoiled countryside promised by the government’s marketing campaigns. However, the gap between image and reality in Ireland is growing ever wider. Much has been written about the deleterious effects the unprecedented economic growth of the 1990s and 2000s had on Ireland’s environment (e.g. Meldon 1992; Dillon 1996; Deegan and Dineen 1997; Wickham and Lohan 2000; McDonagh 2007), and those who visit the country today to actively seek out what is promised in the tourist brochures may well return home disappointed – even though the famed ‘Celtic Tiger’ is, at the time of writing, dormant, and possibly extinct. The political rise of the Irish Green Party, which was in government since 2006 in coalition with Ireland’s most dominant political party in the post-independence era, Fianna Fáil, and the party’s subsequent spectacular fall (losing all its members of parliament in the 2011 election)1 exemplifies the ambiguous and complex attitude which the Irish population have towards their environment. The economic crisis of recent years has thrown into stark relief the impact on the environment of one of the most visible spin-offs of Ireland’s erstwhile prosperity: the housing boom. In many areas of the country, a new phenomenon of the ‘ghost’ housing estate has emerged, characterised by row upon row of unsold new homes in which no one lives, often located in areas of the country where no one apparently wants to live either. One estimate calculated that Ireland’s excess housing stock amounted to 136,000 homes in 2009 (DKM 2009), a quite staggering figure in a country with a total population of only around 4.5 million. Some have proposed that these estates should be bought by the government from developers and bulldozed back into agricultural land (Irish Examiner 2010). In this chapter, I wish to explore some of these themes through an examination of development activity in County Donegal, Ireland’s most northerly county. It is