Macdara’s readers can look forward to future letters that touch on Sceilg Mhichíl and the Giant’s Causeway. Add in Brú na Bóinne and that is our three World Heritage Sites listed out. Three. No Glendalough, no Georgian Dublin, no Burren, no Rock of Cashel. These are all on the Tentative list, with others, and have been since 2010, a period when the State was improvising a new heritage strategy in a rush as construction activity had come to a halt. Tourist monies would do the trick, those high-spending cultural tourists. Previously the Government would not have wanted to consent to the restrictions that UNESCO status brings (this attitude has of course returned with the Recovery). Imagine someone in Glendalough not being allowed a sunroom just because some monks once lived nearby! Or those empty new offices not getting built in Dublin just because some Colonial Architecture was protected by the United Nations!
This last point is worth exploring. As hard as it is to believe that such a stupid attitude could prevail, the State for decades was run by men (yes, just men, despite the extraordinary contribution of women to the struggle) who hated the architecture they inherited. The Georgian terraces by this point were slums, dangerous and dirty. As Frank McDonald writes for the Irish Georgian Society:
A still unidentified Government minister was quoted as saying of the Kildare Place houses: ‘I was glad to see them go. They stand for everything I hate.’
The present writer utterly supports the campaign to rethink the postcolonial space: by all means pull down statues, or erect other ones of revolutionaries or ordinary people in dialogue with them, or move them, or place them at ground level off their pedestal, or put them in a museum, or dress them up, or put up a plaque next to them listing sundry colonial Crimes. Similar thought should be given to the architecture a new State inherits. It would be one thing to take a Year Zero approach, razing Dublin and replacing it with a Republican city in which those living in slums are to be housed in a newly designed environment. Clearly this is not what was proposed. What happened was that our inheritance, our own familiar city cleared of the forces of the Occupation—a city put together by Irish hands, desperate and exploited though they may have been—was allowed to fall apart, with the rich permitted to replace whatever bits of it best fitted their scheme for further enrichment. There was no new Republican design culture for the material environment. Railway stations, barracks and streets were renamed; this was to the good. Some of the grand buildings became museums or State buildings; this too was to the good. But too much of that red-glowing Georgian city was lost. And a culture was long promoted in which Dublin was seen by the rest of the country as insufficiently Irish.
But all of this is a preamble to the minor story Macdara intends to tell by way of an ancient grudge: he has in front of him a horrible and oddly large ticket from a visit to the Gallarus Oratory a few years ago.
It is a well-known site, though not on the scale of those listed above. The present writer and his travelling companion had been fleeced the day before at the Kerry Cliffs, having to pay to park in order to cross a field to see the view. There are two ways to visit the Gallarus Oratory, one that costs you and one that is free. Macdara likely paid, since he has the ticket; fleeced yet again. There was no sense from this visit that one was seeing a national asset: the email on the ticket is for a gmail account. And if the site was run by the State on behalf of the people then the ticket would not include the following in its introduction:
This oratory was built by early christians who loved their trade. Life was much simpler then, and men understood God and His ways much better than they do now.
What is this shite? It has even been translated into French and German on the reverse side. At least the text includes measurement in metres, other than a reference to ruins “about one mile away”—Macdara despises the senseless Imperial Units—which in French intriguingly translates to à deux kilomètres; the German translator, perhaps unwilling to include approximate distances, preferred to write sind leicht zu erreichen: are easy to reach.
The ticket also states that “Successive invaders – Vikings and Normans – burned, robbed and destroyed the settlements around Gallarus and a beautiful way of life was lost forever”. But Gaelic Ireland continued for at least half a millennium after the Normans arrived, and there is a lot to be said about the beauty of more recent ways of life, like medical care, central heating, or for that matter the ability to fleece tourists. The real attack on Ireland, including on religious practice in Ireland, came with a later round of invaders: the English. Leaving aside that the Viking invasion included founding our first cities, the Norman invasion is clearly of a different order to the English Occupation, which has done, and is doing, so much harm to us, notwithstanding some attractive architecture they left behind.
In any case, a note to An Taisce: acquire our important natural and historical sites—acquire them for free, that is—and present them to the people for free, and without the mindless archaisms of Catholicism or Colonialism. And make sure the Irish on the tickets is correct.