BUNGALOW BLITZ

The quotes included here have been taken from the Irish Man’s Diary section of the Irish Times as written by Kevin Myers between 1997 and 2004.

Sections of Myers writing, read by Michael Sherrin, have been included in the video Bungalow Time which was included in the first exhibition in the series at MoDA in 2001 and in Shifting Cement the sound installation included in the fifth exhibition at the Lighthouse: Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City in 2006.

Irish Man’s Diary, by Kevin Myers, 4 August, 1999 (excerpts)

Six million tourists annually by the end of next year, and eight million by the year 2004: these are the ambitions of Bord Fáilte’s chief executive, John Dully. Which merely prompts the question: has nobody thought of locking this man up?

Maybe then we could close down the tourist industry before it goes mad completely and decides to construct nuclear-powered swimming pools in every county, and heliports at the Céide Fields and Newgrange, and a plutonium-recycling plant to steal business from Sellafield (Britain’s biggest tourist attraction), and maybe water-slides down the Cliffs of Moher and a grand-prix track through the Burren, and loads of water sports facilities, with jet-ski dromes in every bay in West Cork, and theme parks everywhere celebrating Ireland’s great artistic heritage, with little Albanian and Rumanian colleens in Celtic dresses warbling about Ze Kerry Donces and Ze Vocky Voad du Dobbelin, all the native females having become commodity brokers who drive Porsches and smoke Marlboro Lite and, talking in loud American, discuss the respective merits of their vibrators over latte and capuccino in imitation-Paris cafes.

Fabric of life

But in fact, we do not need tourism to destroy the fabric of life in Ireland – we are doing a tolerably good job of that ourselves, thank you. But millions of blue-rinses sitting in bus queues in Connemara, or doing the tourist hop-step-and-jump through Cashel before being heel-snapped by specially-trained tourist sheep dogs back into the coach in time to join the three-hour traffic jam in Kildare town, or the herd of pensioners from Dayton, Ohio cantering briskly through Christ Church – they too are doing their bit and that’s all we can ask of them.

The modest correspondence which this column attracts is these days invariably focused on one theme: the ruination of the Irish countryside by a bungalow blizzard. Town after town, village after village, is being besieged by armies of strip development whose individual units appear to have been assembled in the dark using house-building kits from different countries and different cultures. Daylight comes, and what do we see? Why look, Georgian glazing bars on many windows, though not on the huge airport plate glass facing the main road. But the south wall – the one overlooking the green valley, the remaining lush green unfields, unspoilt by development of any kind – why, that has no window at all.

Beside the front door – which is sort of Connecticut, with strong elements of Milton Keynes – are two Victorian carriage lamps, within a large Spanish arch. The oaken beams beside the arch speak of Elizabethan England, with a hey nonny no. Despite the presence of the arch, the builders have, with the thoroughly imaginative ingenuity of their kind, managed to install an ante-bellum Corinthian portico, which, despite its resonances of old Virginia, also manages to convey a strong hint of the Barney Eastwood school of architecture.

Special features

Of course there are many special features which make this property so desirable: the concrete balustrade along its length are early Cement Roadstone, the bottle-end window panes in the hallway are pure Cotswold, and the mock stone cladding manages to convey the rude simplicity of the labourer’s dwelling house. The little fountain in the front garden is Florence at its most beguiling, and the massed array of pastel begonia, why they could be Switzerland, yodle-odle-eeee. And finally, the double-garage which is, deliberately, the house’s most visible feature, why that is pure Essex bank-robber.

A central aesthetic which might have strangled these vast creations before sunrise apparently does not exist. Everywhere, from Oughterard to Rosses Point, from Castlebar to Dunfanaghy, from Enfield to Courtown, architectural atrocities litter our countryside. We have favoured the house-in-every field school of rural planning; and by the time we have reached the glorious figure of eight million tourists in a year, there will hardly be left in the Republic a single field unfavoured by some assembly or other of turrets, porticos, arches, mock cladding, Tudor beams and numerous concrete thingummies.

Close the ports

These risible creations are reasons to close our ports and imitate Albania under Enver Hoxha. We should be making tourism a capital offence and publicly garrotting planners and Bord Fáilte officials in Merrion Square. Instead, it seems, the State is urging foreigners to come and witness our self-destruction. “This long suburban roadway reminds you of Hollywood Hills, does it? Why thank you very much. That’s a mighty compliment. These days we call it Tuscany Wolds, but in the bad old days, it was called the Glen of Aherlow, not a bungalow anywhere. But now, glory be, there are bungalows as far as the eye can see; Bella Vista, and Avonview, and Belair, and Napoli Chilterns, and the Hootenanny Hoedown Corral” (yee ha).

What we are doing is irreversible; we are pillaging a delightful landscape and remorselessly destroying communities and their local cultures right across the country. Isolation seems to confer no immunity; the virus must have been spread by crop-spraying aircraft. Central political will seems unable to police, control or inhibit the construction of the loud and the ludicrous every 50 yards or so. We might indeed have eight million tourists a year by 2004; but they will probably just come to laugh.

© 2001 ireland.com

Irish Man’s Diary, by Kevin Myers, 3 November, 1999 (excerpts)

What is truly depressing about the decision of several county councils to try to ban outsiders from building in the areas they control is not that such a move is illegal and will cost the county council which tries to enforce it a fortune in compensation costs.

No; it is that when local authorities have finally shown some muscle in the matter of housing, they dodge the real issues – the ones they’ve had power over for years: what and where. The failure of every single county council in Ireland to create and enforce a common aesthetic for house design is rapidly turning much of Ireland into a visual catastrophe.

When John Kelleher made the film Eat the Peach in 1986, he used a vast neo-Georgian house in Meath as the deeply risible, hideously visible abode of a gombeen man. The house, it seemed, to say it all: back then, that particular dwelling seemed a by-word for bad taste. Monstrous heaps Not any more. By the standards of what was to follow, that building is a model of architectural discipline, intellectual rigour and aesthetic integrity.

Monstrous heaps have been erected in every county since then, huge structural declarations of the swaggering and boastful vulgarity of the disposable wealth of the owners. Simultaneously, at the other end of the market, the multicultural Lego-bungalow replaced the indigenous dwelling house almost totally.

What has been almost devastatingly certain about the thousands of such houses which have erupted over the country like acne is that they are seldom or never driven by a single aesthetic: houses were assembled from a Lego block of Spanish beach-houses, another Lego block of Georgian Ireland, another Lego block of Victorian London, another Lego block of Tudor Englande.

Concrete balustrades became the pre-eminent feature of every garden; and north-facing walls were given balconies whose sole purpose was to be seen from the road. During these two decades of construction, I am unaware of a single planning officer in the entire country publicly calling for modesty, restraint, or vernacular integrity in the building of houses; “anything goes” was the watchword, and sure enough, everything went.

The folly reached burlesque proportions when the Government introduced tax incentives for building holiday homes in the most beautiful parts of Ireland. This was State-subsidised cretinism, and last week BBC Northern Ireland’s Home Truths programme revealed what the policy has done to Donegal, aided – needless to say – by bizarre, inexplicable and certainly inexcusable decisions by local officials.

Hundreds of seldom-used holiday homes, of invariably preposterous design, now cluster around every scenic spot in the county like animals at a watering hole. Ready-made ghost towns were being created even as the usual bungalowitis spread across the countryside like smallpox, turning Bloody Foreland into Bloody Legoland. Unspoken consensus.

The aesthetic and environmental inertia of the planning authorities in Donegal and elsewhere probably reflects an unspoken consensus throughout Ireland as a whole: we want to wreck the countryside – only now, certain county councils prefer that locals are given a monopoly over the wrecking.

This – informally, and unspokenly – has been the way over large tracts of the country for years. Locals built their higgledy-piggledy, heynonny-no, yer durn tootin’ Gorrgian haciendas wherever they wanted. But now prosperity has brought unprecedented mobility, and clearly many people feel driven by a missionary zeal to spread their particular brand of bad taste away from their own home to pastures new.

Perhaps it is understandable that county councils wish to protect the locals’ ancient and inalienable rights to vandalise the environment, but to do so at the expense of those who would wish to join in the sport from outside is illegal within European law. Article 15 (sub-section p, paragraph iii) of the Maastricht Treaty states that no member state may discriminate against the rights of any citizen of any member state, including its own, to wreck, vandalise, ruin, despoil or ravage the landscape of said member state by the creation of a Pandora’s Box of vulgarity if that member state of the first part not merely allows some of its own citizens to do same, but in certain circumstances actually encourages them to do so.

And did we not have equality laws embraced in full by the our now passionately politically correct Oireachtas? Is it not now illegal to discriminate against anyone because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nose-size, shape of teeth, colour of underwear, length of fingernails, and most of all, county of birth? County managers: don’t try it. It’ll end in tears. Enforce rules. Try something else.

Try imposing aesthetic standards like those in many other countries – Switzerland, France, Denmark, Britain. Make planning permissions – and people will need them; we can’t all live in ditches – dependent on inconspicuousness and sensitivity to the environment. And enforce your rules. No more balustrades; no panorama windows. Ban palazze gombini, and enforce broadleaf tree plantings.

Our countryside can take many more homes, and people won’t mind if they’re built with restraint and regard for the place where they will stand for the next hundred years. But do I believe that local officials will do anything at all to curb the hideous blight randomly pockmarking the country like bombs from B52s? You’re not sure? Okay, try this one: do I believe that Pope JPII is a Zulu transsexual called Mabel O’Malley? Same answer.

© 2001 ireland.com