BUNGALOW BLITZ

Bungalow Blitz: The House that Jack Built

in Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture, Banff (The Walter Phillips Gallery, 2006, forthcoming)

by Aoife Mac Namara

[cont’d]

A Question of Land

Much of Ireland is sparsely settled today. In the countryside the long, peaceful perspectives are only occasionally broken by the figures of children playing or farm people going about their tasks … Western Ireland, on the other side of the Shannon, is a different country altogether, no more like the plentiful midlands than Wyoming is like Wisconsin … but although the west is poor farming country ... it has some of the most spectacular scenic beauty in all of Europe, heightened by the region’s atmosphere of unspoilt primitive simplicity and peacefulness that seems to detach it from the rest of the world. — Joe McCarthy, In Island Isolation⁵²

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or “recognized�? — Frederick Hegel⁵³

The stakeholders — the people invested in the bungalow debates — are many and it could be argued that they share as many concerns as they do disagreements. Gearóid Ó’Tuathaigh in the essay “Ireland’s Land Question: A Historical Perspective�? maintains that rural society in Ireland is as complex as the complex historical circumstances out of which it has evolved⁵⁴. If he is right, understanding the threads that run through the arguments for and against the building of one-off bungalows in the west of Ireland necessitates understanding something of how the landscape, built environment and culture of the area means different things to the various actors drawn to its contemporary stage. It also involves thinking carefully about what it means for one constituency to impose — or want to impose — their beliefs and values on another. For, if Hegel’s arguments are to be believed, the worth of this acquisitive subject, his or her sense of humanness, depends on the approval — or submission — of those upon whom they seek to impose their values. Or, in the case of the bungalow debates, those of us who have struggled to have our taste and preferences recognized by the bungalow builders and their regulating authorities have a great deal to lose if they fail to submit to our will⁵⁵. Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose’s recent book _Landscapes and Politics: Deterritorialisations…Revisionings_ brings together the work of a number of scholars concerned with the mobility and equivocality of the term “landscape�? in contemporary culture⁵⁶. In the introduction to the section ‘Contested Landscapes’, Gillian Rose writes, “Given the productivity of landscapes — the way they seem to articulate many issues, in various registers — its hardly surprising that many landscapes are contested. Their meaning and significance may be debated, their implications challenged⁵⁷.” In fact, the lack of a unified (and unifying) aesthetic for the landscape and architecture of rural Ireland is often the most clearly stated criticism of the houses and their builder/occupiers. In the words of journalist Nuala O’Faolain, broadcast on RTÉ radio, “Our society does not have a consensual view of landscape. There is a view which acknowledged the beauty of landscape and its importance in our daily lives, but is uncomfortable with the idea of a planning authority playing a regulatory role in this area⁵⁸.”

According to Kevin Myers , a consequence of this anarchic approach to architecture and planning in the west of Ireland is that we now “have the most atrociously ugly bungalows all over our countryside, litter set in concrete and breeze block, because it is what we want. That is our will; and in the expression of that will, we are in the process of devastating one of the last unspoilt countrysides in western Europe⁵⁹.” However, despite the vitriol with which the debate has been conducted, little effort seems to go into understanding why, for example, the “huge airport plate glass�” windows Kevin Myer’s observes in the Jack Fitzsimons-style bungalows do not face the “the remaining lush green fields, unspoilt by development of any kind,�” but the main road⁶⁰. Given just how powerful landscape has been to the exploration, development and maintenance of ideas of Irish national identity, culture, heritage and tradition, something curious emerges. While the bungalow-centred arguments about what does (or does not) constitute appropriate architectural style implicitly acknowledge the contested nature of these landscapes (we fight over their use), they have made little progress in understanding why the west of Ireland appears to be of such concern for those who neither live nor work there — but for whom it remains a strong locus of our collective imaginations.

Just over ten years ago, Catherine Nash published an article tracing the history of the construction of the image of the west of Ireland with which we are familiar today. Nash claims that this image — of a culturally and geographically remote place of national origin — first rose to prominence in the first decades of the twentieth –century, when the indigenous Anglo-Irish began to lay the foundations for their takeover of power in the much anticipated — but never realized — establishment of Home Rule⁶¹. Nash also claims that the idea of the west of Ireland which featured so prominently in the artistic and literary work of the Irish-Ireland movement of this period, while not a direct extension of the representations initiated by colonial agencies and institutions during the nineteenth century, was, nonetheless, inexorably linked to it. The ambivalent position of the Anglo-Irish, as the now indigenous descendants of the colonisers (sic), heightened their eagerness to find a region of pure Irishness with which to identify, despite their class and religious differences. To writers of the Irish-Ireland movement also, the West could signify the source for the revitalising (sic) of Ireland, a landscape of both personal and national regeneration⁶².

Writing about how Ireland (particularly the west of Ireland) began to function in the work of Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats as an imaginary place through which could recognize himself as “Irish,�? while, contemporaneously allowing him to be recognized as “Irish�? by others, Declan Kiberd has argued that “Ireland, for him, would be an ‘imaginary homeland,’ the sort of place endlessly invented and reinvented by exiles who fear that, if they do not give it a local habitation in words, it might entirely disappear⁶³.” Perhaps there is, in this quote, a clue to why many of the (often Anglo-Irish) professionals active in the Irish culture, heritage and planning industries are so threatened by the blissful disregard being shown to our imaginary homeland by the bungalowbuilders Might the security of our national and international, urban and suburban identities be somehow bound up with our imaginative relationship to this region and its histories: a relationship set in place by the work of the Irish-Ireland movement, the Gaelic League and other urban-based campaigns for the preservation of the culture, heritage, languages and — most significantly — landscape of the west of Ireland⁶⁵?

In the early 1970s, my Irish parents moved my sister and myself from our suburban lives in the Canadian Maritimes to “palm beach”,� a small bungalow we rented from neighbours at the very end of Dookinella village on Achill Island, Co. Mayo⁶⁶. While I didn’t know it then, ours was not an isolated move. Rather, my sister and myself were among a growing number of foreign-born Irish children to move to the west of Ireland as part of the first significant wave of returning emigrants in the nation’s long history of mass immigration⁶⁷. A move that was to irreversibly challenge the ideas of the west of Ireland adapted from those of the colonial period by the Gaelic Revivalists in the early decades of the twentieth century and sustained by the cultural elites since independence: ideas about the west as a place both spatially and temporarily distanced from the rest of Ireland, a place which Brian Graham claims has come to operate as a spatial metaphor for Irish nationhood as a whole⁶⁸. Taken with the established history of seasonal migration to the lowlands of Scotland and the building sites of England, the practice of immigration to North America by young single men and women made our small two-roomed school an unexpectedly cosmopolitan place. Children spoke of Camden, Cleveland and Brooklyn with greater familiarity than they did Dublin, Belfast or Cork. Accordingly, while remaining rooted to family small holdings and traditional settlements, the people of Achill were, like many in the more isolated areas of the west, more socially, culturally and geographically mobile than many of their compatriots in the larger cities and towns.

In the introduction to his book The Bungalow, Anthony D. King argues that the bungalow, as a dwelling type, “is possibly the only one which, in form and name, can most certainly be found in every continent of the world⁶⁹.” Perhaps, then, it is this very lack of national distinction that allows the bungalow to function, on the one hand as the dwelling form of choice in the west of Ireland while, on the other, become relegated as object of ridicule by those of us whose increasingly anonymous or global urban lives are rendered more secure by a sense of self that continues to operate in many and different ways in relation to the imaginary spaces, place and cultures of this region. “Achill�,” writes Kevin Myers, “is to my mind the most wonderful part of the west, unbearably beautiful, awesomely wild⁷⁰.” That the landscapes, houses or people of the west of Ireland, or Achill in particular, meant this much — if anything at all — to so many in the towns and cities of the other provinces was not something I was aware of until, in the late-1970s, my family moved to my paternal townland, Newgarden, near the village of Castleconnell in Co. Limerick: a village that was quickly becoming an affluent suburb of the nearby city of Limerick. Here, I saw one lush green field after another stripped, developed and possessed by one increasingly ostentatious house after another. Nowhere was there a unified architectural style, nowhere was consideration given to the preservation of the fine stonewalls, vernacular buildings or grand houses of the old ascendancy. Having witnessed this singularly unsentimental destruction of one remarkable built heritage in favour of one-off — sometimes architect-designed — bungalows, neo-Tudor colonials and faux Georgian piles, it never occurred to me that sentimentality or nostalgia loomed large in the psyche of the rising bourgeoisie⁷¹. “Put bluntly,”� as Eddie Holt wrote in The Irish Times, “many people not only feel, but have been made to feel, that lobbying for the preservation of, say, certain buildings — even buildings which they may believe to be beautiful — can be practically traitorous of their ancestry, class and ideology. In Ireland, the great houses of the Anglo-Irish, many of them — if art and politics can be separated — aesthetically beautiful and desired, if politically ugly and despised (because of the imperial caste system which made them possible), can be understood in such terms⁷².” As an art student in Limerick in the 1980s, when I heard friends from towns, suburbs and cities across the country complain about the spread of bungalow blight and the horrors of bungalow blitz in Achill and the across the west of Ireland, not only did I feel uncomfortable, defensive and confused, I also began to understand that Ireland was partitioned in more ways than one⁷³.

As a child, I had often heard the older members of my mother’s family talk about how, after returning to Ireland for the first time after years in America, relatives were often profoundly disappointed, not pleased, at the changes prosperity had wrought on the family farm and its buildings. More particularly, they were said to regret the loss of the whitewashed thatched house to the new bungalow, and, more often than not, its relegation to the status of byre. In Limerick in the 1980s, I was learning that embedded in the laments of these young urban and suburban art students there was something of a similar sense of disappointment. A loss. Here Stephanie Rains’ observation that “the concept of home, with all the powerful associations it contains, becomes particularly complex for a diaspora that has reached its second, third or even fourth generation since that home was left behind�” is particularly helpful. Written in the context of her work on the image of Ireland in film and tourism targeted at the American (mostly Irish- American) market, her observations open up the possibility of thinking about other constituencies for whom the concept of the west of Ireland describes a national home place that is not only “elsewhere, but which is not directly and personally remembered⁷⁴.” Such constituencies include those in which my art-school friends participated; communities located not in the extra-national diaspora, but in Ireland’s increasingly globalized urban and suburban communities⁷⁵.

By the mid-1980s, the myth the west of Ireland as a place caught in time, a place of fires and folklore, thatched cottages and with a cultural authenticity that had been lost elsewhere in Ireland had taken firm root. The concepts of primitive and wild, otherness, remoteness and essential Irishness attached to it for aesthetic and political purposes by colonial and later nationalist cultural and political discourse had stuck. This was common sense, and to think differently about the west and its built and natural environments was not going to be easy. Writing about how the west of Ireland was produced in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of the picturesque and sublime, David Brett states: “to be able to view a tract of countryside … as if it were a painting is to take a privileged position of detachment and disinterest … those who work the land very rarely regard it as art. And those who live in sublime landscapes frequently regard them as dreary wilderness from which they long to escape⁷⁶.” My friends had gone to Achill not as open-minded strangers, but as visitors already schooled in — and familiar with — an idea of what this island off the west coast of Ireland would be like⁷⁷. Our school books (which, for my generation, had a strange preoccupation with turf cutting and hay gathering), our literature and the image Ireland produced of itself for foreign consumption through tourism all contributed to the provision of prior knowledge about this place as somewhere distinct: somewhere that provided an alternative to the everyday, comfortable, but increasingly globalized and indistinct urban and suburban environments out of which these visits were undertaken⁷⁸. David Brett argues that, “like the Highlands of Scotland, like Brittany, like the Alps and other regions, Ireland, (especially its western coast) has stood for the primitive, the unspoilt, the wild and the natural⁷⁹.” For art students working in the context of an overwhelmingly modernist institution — the provincial Irish Art School — with its reliance on cultural forms and aesthetic practices enabled by ideas of self/other, culture/nature, modern/primitive, the promise of the west of Ireland as a close-at-hand equivalent to Monet’s Brittany, Gauguin’s Polynesia or Robert Henri’s Achill, was difficult to resist, let alone give up⁸⁰.

Brett is not alone in working to understand how the idea of the west of Ireland has operated in relation to the production of new, post-independence, concepts of Ireland and Irishness. Writing in the book In Search of Ireland, Brian Graham argues that “the continuing acceptance, beyond Ireland, of stereotypical images of Ireland and its place points to a widespread suspension of intellectual judgement on Ireland and tacit support of political, social and cultural forms that would not be countenanced so uncritically elsewhere in Europe⁸¹.” And, while it is fair to argue that much has changed in how Ireland is perceived in the eight years since the publication of Graham’s book, it is notable that, in the context of the “bungalow question,”� the ideas of Ireland used by critics in the structuring of their opposition to what has been described as the increasing suburbanization of Ireland, remain firmly entrenched.

By contrast (to Britain), look at what Mayo — which the tourist blurbs urge foreign visitors to experience — is now becoming. The open spaces, byroads, peninsulas and hillsides — even fenced-off commonage — are being filled in with one-off, suburban-style houses, all discharging chemical, natural and other wastes into individual cesspits with predictable effect on groundwater. Soon the northern slopes of Croagh Patrick will feature the back gardens of bungalows all along their base and approach ridges. For how much longer can visitors continue to be talked into coming here to view this? — Michael Murphy⁸²

Brian Graham is among a number of scholars who argue that the idea of the west of Ireland as home to a culture, identity and people elsewhere obliterated by colonization began during the nineteenth-century Gaelic revival. He writes:

initially, if ironically, also associated with the Anglo-Irish elite — and created an emblematic landscape in which certain artefacts acquired mnemonic status because they fulfilled the need for a retroactive continuity of culture to a distant age prior to the ‘book of invasions’ that Anglophobic Irish history all too often became … the imagery accompanying this narrative was of a predominantly rural Ireland, its true cultural heartland defined by the landscapes and way of life of the wild, western Atlantic fringes — those furthermost removed from Angloinfluence but also most congruent with the precepts of nineteenth-century Romanticism�[83].

In the context of this project, Graham’s argument is interesting, for the campaign against one-off housing in the west of Ireland has become, largely conflated with calls for the preservation of the landscapes (physical, as well as cultural). This plea is organized and advanced not by the people who live there, but by national and international élites acting in the greater good.

In October 1999, Clive Symmons wrote to The Irish Times to warn its readers of the urgency of the situation:

Following on from the recent letters to your newspaper on rural development, there is another aspect I should like to raise that is even more serious than bad planning and the Irish countryside. It is the seemingly deliberate destruction of the old vernacular houses — be they cottages or crofts — throughout rural Ireland, but particularly on the Atlantic fringes. Such old rural dwellings are still disappearing at an alarming rate … in a process encouraged by planning policies which seem to see no worth in them, as to my knowledge often the only way to achieve planning permission for a modern dwelling in scenic parts of the rural west and north-west is to undertake to demolish an existing old building and then build on its site. Thus even as I write, old rural buildings, which fit so naturally into the Irish rural landscape are being pulled down to make way for ‘bungalow blitz’ replacements or worse … I have seen this phenomenon sweeping parts of rural Co. Donegal, which I know well. When I bought my old ‘croft’ some 30 years ago there (sadly now one of the few examples still in my area), whitewashed vernacular buildings, roofed in the aesthetically pleasing locally-minded slates, were everywhere to be seen and were being lived in. Now hardly any remain. Most have been bulldozed, with full approval — and indeed encouragement — of officialdom to make a ‘site’ for what is often a modern monstrosity, or have been left to decay in the background of the house, possibly as an extra cattle byre for the farm … This ‘policy’ (if such it can be called) must be reversed immediately to save what few examples of traditional vernacular buildings still remaining in the scenic parts of Ireland. Ironically it is often non-national ‘blow-ins’ who appreciate this wonderful part of the Irish heritage and are restoring such old buildings in the traditional style. Unless something positive is done about this problem at a national level — and quickly — it is bound to have an affect on tourism. For once foreign tourists find that the cottages, which still feature on postcards hardly now exist in Ireland, they may well decide not to come back. As with the Irish donkey, the time is fast approaching when the only way a tourist can see a traditional Irish cottage is to buy a postcard⁸⁴.

This letter raises some important issues. First, while the author writes that purchased his “old croft�” some thirty years ago, he appears to have learned very little about the community within which it was situated. The term “croft�” is as foreign to Co. Donegal as the concept of loving restoration being visited upon the architecture of rural poverty and isolation that is the “whitewashed vernacular building.”� While Dr. Symmons may well remember these small, often damp and poorly situated houses as being lived-in, what he forgets, or simply does not know, is that fifty, forty and even thirty years ago, rural Donegal was, like much of the west and northwest, experiencing what seemed like an irreversible population decline. At that time, sons and daughters left one whitewashed house after another for Ireland’s towns and cities, or, more likely, for more prosperous and comfortable lives in the urban flats and suburban homes of North America, Britain and Australia. However, despite — or perhaps precisely because of — these patterns of life and the wider political and economic developments of which they were a part, large and influential segments of Irish culture have continued, like Dr. Symmons, to “be fixated on naturalistic representations of a rural Ireland of an earlier generation⁸⁵.”

In one of his many contributions to the The Irish Times, columnist Kevin Myers contributes to this debate by considering how tourism’s construction of Ireland’s meaning in relation to the west of Ireland is constantly undermined by the proliferation of these one-off, aesthetically “inauthentic�” bungalows in some of the country’s most important tourist and heritage sites. The article attacks the contradictory positions taken by different agencies of the Irish government, which promote the idea of an idyllic rural and unspoilt Ireland on the one hand while, on the other, do little to halt the increasing suburbanization of this very landscape:

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 fields, 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.

Of course there are many special features which make this property so desirable: the concrete balustrade along its length are early Cement Roadstone, the bottleend 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 … 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.

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 politics are, it 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 laugh⁸⁶.

Here, Myers appears to be concerned with how the post-bungalow transformations in the built environment of rural Ireland might not only be part of what he calls the material “ruination of the Irish countryside�? but, significantly, might be also be attacking the cultural capital against which much of our recent economic success rests. Such transformations thwart the landscape’s symbolic value to those outside of its demesne, and for whom it acts not as tillage, pastureland, building sites or quarries, but rather as an imaginative and symbolic place around which the often — but not exclusively — urban consumer organizes her claims for cultural distinction, authority and heritage. In this respect, Myer’s work is a great deal more than a witty, urbane and insightful indictment of recent planning and building practice in the west of Ireland. Rather, in drawing our attention to the number and variety of stakeholders in the debate, he begins to describe something of the cultural productivity that has been the — albeit accidental — byproduct of “bungalow blitz”.

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Notes [cont’d]

⁵² Joe McCarthy, “In Island Isolation” in Ireland (New York: Time Life Incorporated, 1964), 17.

⁵³ G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 230.

⁵⁴ Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, “Ireland’s Land Question” in Rural Change in Ireland, ed. John Davis, (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies 1999), 17. belfast

⁵⁶ Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose, Landscape and Politics: Deterritotialisations … Revisionings (London: Blackdog Press, 2003) 13-19

⁵⁷ Gillian Rose, “Contested Landscapes” in Dorrian and Rose, 270.

⁵⁸ Nuala O’Faolain, “What is the land of Ireland for,” interview on RTÉ radio.

⁵⁹ Kevin Myers, “An Irishman’s Diary,” The Irish Times, August 27th, 1998.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Nash, “Embodying the Nation: The West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity” in O’Connor and Cronin, 87. See also Kiberd, 286–326.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Kiberd, 99. In this passage, Kiberd argues that while Yeats and his fellow Irish literary exiles were one of the first groups of decolonizing intellectuals to formulate their vision of their native country during “a youthful sojourn in an imperial capital” before returning home to implement it, they were not the first, having as they did the precedent of the invention of the American Republic by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and its “democratic culture” by Whitman and Emerson.

⁶⁴ Graham, 193-195.

⁶⁵ The Gaelic League Idea, Séan O’Tuama (Cork: Mercer Press, 1972) 26-43.

⁶⁶ Palm Beach was built by the Gallagher family in the mid-1960s, and, like the “bungalow bliss” homes that were to follow it in the village, it was built from a book of house patterns, probably that produced by the department of local government between 1962–1969.

⁶⁷ John Boyle’s autobiographical novel, Galloway Street: Growing Up Irish in Scotland (London: Doubleday, 2001) explores, how and in what circumstances, many Achill people left their traditional homes in the West of Ireland for Britain, the Americas and Australia and considers the ambivalent relationship many have to the places and architectures of their past.

⁶⁸ Graham, 193–195.

⁶⁹ King, 2.

⁷⁰ Myers “An Irishman’s Diary”, The Irish Times (Friday, March 30th, 2001), 14

⁷¹ In his work on the national rehabilitation of “big house” tourism in the 1990s published in An Bórd Fáilte’s tourism magazine, Ireland of the Welcomes, Michael Cronin suggests that its refusal to address the issue of ongoing partition in Ireland, gradually laid the groundwork for a challenge to traditional nationalist contempt for the architecture of Anglo-Ireland: “Embracing the Anglo-Irish tradition was to establish the pluralist bone fide of a new Ireland … it became possible, even desirable to celebrate and renovate the ‘noble houses’ and the ‘planned gardens’… Second, a revival of interest in the literature of the Big House … led to a recomposition of the literary landscape. The whitewashed cottages of Rosmuc gave way to the castles and demnsnes.” Cronin and O’Connor, 190.

⁷² Eddie Holt, “We too are guilty of cultural crimes” in The Irish Times, (Saturday, March 21st, 2001) 1.

⁷³ It is important to note that, since the 1980s, and especially during the 1990s, a significant shift in attitude toward the built heritage of Anglo-Ireland can be detected in the cultural politics of heritage and conservation in Ireland. And whereas such work was, in the past, largely undertaken with support from the Dublin Georgian Society or An Táisce (National Trust for Ireland), many of the recent restorations of such houses and landscapes have been undertaken by private initiative. See www.antaisce.org.

⁷⁴ Rains, 196–197.

⁷⁵ Rains’ analysis of the image of the house in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1953) is a particularly useful and sympathetic critique of the ambivalence of home in the unconscious of the diasporic tourist. See Rains, 211.

⁷⁶ Brett, 40.

⁷⁷ In 1888, Achill Island was linked by bridge (Michael Davitt Bridge) to the mainland at Achill Sound. For a general history of the Island from the Fifth Century AD to 1997 see Teresa McDonald, Achill Island: Archaeology-History-Folklore, (Tullamore: IAS Publications, 1997). For a chronology of the island’s history, see www.achill-island.com.

⁷⁸ For a discussion of the work of An Bórd Fáilte (Irish Tourist Board) in the context of the West of Ireland, see Nash, 86–112. It could be argued that the Irish National School curriculum was, until its replacement with the Nua Curriculum in 2000, central to the propagation of this idea of the West of Ireland. Early readers pictured girls helping mammy bake bread, feed the hens and hang out the washing, while the boys were busy cutting hay, footing turf and fixing modest Massey Fergusons. Further, in the selection of literature used in both Irish and English language curriculae for 12- to16-year olds and 16- to18-year olds, work by Irish (either Anglo-Irish or Gael) writers interested in rural and agricultural themes or from these contexts was privileged. An example of this is the book Peig, an autobiographical account of Peig Sayers’ life on the de-populating Blasket Islands during the 1940s. This book was, until the introduction of the Nua Curriculum, the only full-length book all 16- to18-year olds were obliged to study at Irish secondary schools. Peig Sayers, Peig Sayers: An Old Woman’s Reflections, trans. Seamus Ennis (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1977). See also Peig Sayers, _Peig Sayers: An Old Woman’s Reflections_, trans. Seamus Ennis (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1977). Tomás O’Crohán, An tÓileanach, (Dublin: Muinntir C. S. Ó Fallamhain, 1929) and Leslie Matson, _Méiní: The Blasket Nurse_, (Cork: Mercer Press, 1996)

⁷⁹ Brett, 127.

⁸⁰ The foundation program that was a prerequisite for all diploma and degree-granting programs in Art and Design in Ireland during the 1980s was based largely on the foundation program designed for the Bauhaus School in the 1920s. In 1984, the National Gallery of Ireland hosted the first major exhibition of “Irish Impressionists.” This exhibition brought to the attention of art students the formation of the West of Ireland as one of modernity’s “others.” See Julian Campbell, The Irish Impressionists, (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1984).

⁸¹ Graham, 85.

⁸² Michael Murphy, “Pattern of Rural Housing” in ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Irish Times, (January 23rd, 2004).

⁸³ Graham, 195.

⁸⁴ Clive R. Symmonds, “Letter to the Editor”, The Irish Times, (Tuesday, October 5th, 1999) 13

⁸⁵ Cleary, 114.

⁸⁶ Myers, “An Irish Man’s Diary”, ‘Opinion Section’, The Irish Times, (August 4th, 1998) 13.

© Aoife Mac Namara 2005