North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (or How I learned to stop worrying about Fintan O'Toole's deeply furrowed brow)

The Great Wall of Thomond - Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare.

I like Fintan O'Toole, one of the Irish Times' most senior journalists. I like the fact that he thinks hard about a topic before committing his thoughts to paper. I like the fact that he doesn't always take the easy option of pandering to majority opinion. His book on the Beef Tribunal was practically a public service. I often agree with his critiques of what Ireland, and the Irish, have become. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish he might chill out a bit.

Fintan went down to the new Cliffs of Moher visitors centre during the week. He wasn't happy. In a column entitled "Taming the Cliffs of Moher", he complains that

You can be entertained, mildly educated, fed, relieved and gently parted from some money. You cannot be moved. You can be a visitor, a tourist, a customer. You cannot be a human being confronted with the savage power of the physical world.

I was curious, since I'd seen a TV programme on the new centre during the week , so I went down there yesterday to have a look [1] . And Fintan, I think you might be overreacting. Eight hundred thousand people visit the Cliffs every year. Most of them are not on an existential journey of discovery; most are tourists in rental cars or in coaches that will only have an hour or two to have a look, take their snaps, and move on. Yesterday, on a cold, wet day in February, the place was full of tourists - God knows where most of them came from (I mean, who books a West of Ireland tour for February ? I should have asked.). A cold drizzle raked the cliffs and the wind was strong enough to shear your ears off.

I won't claim that the place is perfect. The new centre is built into the hill in front of the cliff face - you park across the road and walk over. Fintan (and other media descriptions of the new centre) all fail to mention one important thing - the centre is not finished yet. The car park doesn't have tarmac yet (so that lack of marked parking spots means some higgledy-piggledy parking), and some of the buildings are still under construction. The restaurant, which has a panoramic view of both the Cliffs and the sloping bay at Lahinch a few miles away is open for business (and very nice it is, too) but, unforgivably for a tourist facility, dos not have the capability to process Laser or credit cards yet - it's coming next month. The place looks a bit rough still, too, since the landscaping has just been finished, and the grass that will cover most of the excavated soil has not grown yet. On the plus side, the hawkers of tat, sorry, merchandise, who now have purpose built shops built into the hill, haven't moved in yet, so the only hard sell that you will encounter on the site is indoors, in the new centre.

Bunker mentality - trading stalls built into the landscape.

However, the reason anyone turns up is to see the cliffs, and they haven't changed a bit. The view is the same, the howling wind is the same and, alas, the chances of getting a drenching is just the same. The only difference is that there is a properly paved path along the cliffs and a discrete stone barrier to stop people falling over the edge. And that is really the point of the Centre. Yesterday, as the weather deteriorated, you would get completely drenched unless you were wearing head-to-toe waterproof gear. And by the time I left, there was very little view at all. But inside, it's possible to see the cliffs as it would appear on the finest of summer days, as well as the view you'd get from both the air and the sea - views most of us will never experience otherwise.

Carving out a niche...the restaurant is definitely worth a visit.

In fact, the Centre suffers from the same affliction that almost everything in Celtic Tiger Ireland - the bloody cost. The building and landscaping costs a whopping 31 million euro to build what is a relatively small centre, clear the car-park and pave the outside area. It is a fiver per car but coach drivers now have to pay 60 euro per coach (up from a fiver previously) which seems a bit opportunistic. And charging for the audiovisual display is a rip-off. The excellent dining facilities and huge retail area means that families will already spend a decent amount of cash in the place.

Should the centre have been built at all ? Absolutely - it's a great design, and by summer, will have grown into the landscape. O'Toole writes

It is all slick, polished, professional, impressively engineered and utterly soulless

Fintan fails to distinguish between sanitised and sanitary. Adding basic facilities, keeping places tidy and providing proper parking is the very least that any civilised country can do. I'm tired of visiting places in the west to find vandalised toilets, dumped rubbish and nowhere to park. In Connemara National Park, Diamond Hill has been paved so that anyone from eight to 80 can walk to the top in zero visibility on most weather conditions [ I was down there during the summer and watched an elderly American couple - bless them - slowly but surely made the summit]. Has the hill been robbed of its spirit ? Of course not - the same wonderful view remains (if you get a clear day!). We need to get away from the idea that chaos, dirt and disorganization are somehow essential to the Irish Celtic spirit.

I'm all for enriching my soul by gazing upon the primal beauty of nature - but dammit, I want to be able to have a cappuccino afterwards. And what could be more 21st century Ireland than that?

I've added a Flickr Gallery here of the centre.

[1]according to the milometer on my car, it's almost exactly a 100 mile round trip from the centre of Galway to the Cliffs.

Main picture - Camera= Canon 5D, lens= Canon 24-105@24mm, ISO=640, aperture=f4, speed=1/1600 sec (forgot to reset the ISO to 100 when I went outside the building).

visitor centre, cliff, moher, ireland, irishblogs, photoblogs, photography, galwayblogs, clare, monasette, Canon, 5D, february, 2007

Posted by Monasette at February 11, 2007 05:05 PM