Our Crumbling Heritage

//During 40 years of native government we we have restored only one old
building.//

The Yeats Summer School in Sligo is very instructive. On a bigger
scale conditions are not unlike what they are in other towns I know.

A little group of intelligent people with some outside help are
literally trying to do the impossible on a shoe-string, and making a
remarkable job of it. Students come there as they have not come to
Ireland since the Early Middle Ages, though the conditions they work
in must be something of a shock to them.

Their headquarters in the local technical school are not practical,
much less dignified and comfortable. Yet there, in the centre of the
town and on the bank of the river is one of the most beautiful
buildings in Ireland—Sligo Abbey. It is at least as fine as an Oxford
College, yet I doubt if most of the students even look inside it,
because it is a shabby, shoddy, unsightly ruin. And in this, at least,
Sligo is no exception.

I drove back through Roscommon and from a distance it looks
astonishingly impressive with the ruins of its great castle and
church, but the impressiveness rapidly disappears as you get nearer.

Anyone who travels through the country, could toss off the names of
thirty or forty towns, north and south, with buildings of outstanding
beauty and interest which have been allowed to develop into
eyesores. Trim, thirty miles from Dublin, would be a marvel if only it
happened to be thirty miles from any other capital in Western
Europe. Now, this is the direct result of the seventeenth century
conquest, and not only are we doing little to undo it; we are
carrying it on to the best of our destructive ability.

During forty years of native government we have restored precisely one
old building, Bunratty Castle. We did it in the wrong way ; handed
over the most interesting part of it to private ownership and turned
the rest into a tourist joint ; but even so, anyone who remembers the
heap of ruins a_^id sheds at Bunratty Bridge will understand when
looking at the present handsome building precisely what I mean by
undoing the Conquest.

It cost you and me about £20,000, apart from Lord Gort's generous
contribution, but, apart from its cultural importance, which is what
matters to me, even as a tourist attraction it can hardly be called a
bad investment.

Why can we not invest more of the public money in a way like this that
will bring us in substantial returns?

The National Monuments Commission is a purely advisory body whose
expert advice is consistently rejected by minor civil servants.

Mr. Donagh O'Malley, Parliamentary Secretary, has asked for an
independent board with an income of something like £300,000 a year.

We can already form a very good idea of the Government's reply. It is
going to collect £10,000,000 by means of a purchase tax, and not one
penny of it has been earmarked for any such scheme. Most of it will go
to foreign industrialists who will collect the taxpayer’s money, and
may or may not skip when the skipping is good.

I know things have improved since when the Board of Works replied to a
protest of mine against the cementing up of a beautiful traceried
window that “it did not interfere with the stability of the building,”
and an Irish newspaper ridiculed my suggestion that we should install
/electric light in Newgrange/.

The Inspector of National Monuments and the Tourist Board are both
doing excellent work, and there //is// electric light in Newgrange,
but as a Tourist Board official said to me recently “We know we’re
only scratching at it.”

You don’t undo a conquest by scratching. In the Dail Mr. O’Malley
referred doubtfully to my own proposal for the re-roofing of Cashel and the 
objections of the purists.

But it isn't only Cashel that has to be re-roofed: scores of other
buildings will have to be restored as well; monuments in isolated
places which cannot be maintained must be destroyed and the fine
doorways, windows, crosses and tombs brought to buildings where they
can be protected and displayed to the best advantage. This is not
architectural vandalism; it is plain common sense.

A few months ago in France I noticed that the scholarly parish priest
of Thaims had bought the stones of another ruined church to repair his
own.  But no mere advisory committee can take the drastic decisions
that have to be taken if we are ever to undo the conquest and make
Ireland something more than a mere graveyard of lost causes.

And while we dither and haver, the conquest goes on: the holes torn
in the wall of Cormac's Chapel in the eighteenth century still
continue to let in the rain that rots the carvings; and the beautiful
monumental statuary that was carried away at the same time continues
to rot in the churchyard walls of the present Protestant cathedral.

In Ballintubber, Father Egan is restoring his own magnificent church
by his own efforts, and I feel sure that not only will he be
successful, but that he will receive every assistance from the
authorities. Civil servants have only one unvarying regulation: “Kill
it, or join it,” and they can’t kill Ballintubber Abbey: even the
English couldn’t do that. But what a little parish like Ballintubber
can do, a great tourist centre like Sligo can do, and if Sligo begins,
Cashel, Trim, Ennis and the rest are bound to follow. 


Sunday Independent Magazine, 1963-11-17, pp.3-5