A Long Look at Ireland: How Ireland Looks
How Ireland Looks
Green, empty, desolate and beautiful? Full of sleepy villages and historic town centres?
Well, yes and no.
Certainly all these can be found pretty easily, even at the same time! Once it was true of much of the country, though at that time you often had to avert your eyes from the surrounding poverty, but many different things have conspired to change the appearance of the Irish landscape.
The effect of Tourism
Visit quaint little towns....
....with busloads of others It's a major earner and everything possible is done to maximise the average visitor spend. Many of the most naturally beautiful parts of Ireland are now home to large "interpretive centres"(aka gift stores), car parks, hotels and guesthouses, narrow roads crowded with tour busses and masses of people trying to take photographs that include the nice bits while excluding all of the above.
A quiet and beautiful out of the way spot loses something when there are 20 coach loads of tourists wandering around it at the same time and somehow the hard sell of tacky souvenirs and overpriced snack food takes the mystique away from an ancient settlement.
Of course this is not all bad, there are many wild and beautiful places left and there are interpretive centres that truly add to a visitors experience of a place.
The reality is that in many rural places local people rely on a steady stream of income from visitors to survive - but there is the ever present danger that overdevelopment will destroy the very thing that prompted it.
Suburbanisation
A few people live like this....
...but this is way more commonIreland can no longer be called a rural country. Most people live in cities or towns and a large proportion of those who don't commute daily to work in them.
Even smaller urban centres are rapidly growing, creating a sprawl of generally uninspiring suburban development and spawning a rash of often ill conceived building in rural areas within commuting distance.
The rising number of one-off houses in the countryside is a major bone of contention, with friction between those who assert a citizens right to live wherever they want and those who contend that poorly designed and inappropriate houses dotted randomly around beautiful places are destroying the natural heritage.
Certainly there are times when the marvellous sweep of a valley, from sea to moody hillside, is marred by the presence of someone's huge dream home complete with Doric columns, Tudor windows and parking for the veritable fleet of family cars required for the daily commute from this glorious half acre.
Which bring us nicely to the amazing growth that has taken place in house building over the last decace or so and .... Where people Live
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