Revisiting Ireland’s west coast: what has changed in 25 years?

A quarter century has passed since I hoped for the best on a month-long hitchhike of the coast in June 1991 which turned out to be the wettest on record. After lonely hours and days spent waiting for lifts in the howling wind and rain, I questioned my sanity. Gradually people started to pick me up, telling me their stories, and their generosity pulled me through. I jotted down details of conversations, the immediate, on-the-spot repositories – known to some travel writers as “nibble notes”. Two years later, Irish Shores: A Journey Round the Rim of Ireland was released on an unsuspecting reading public.

For my meandering journey in 2015, from Malin Head to Kinsale, I wanted to see how the west coast has changed. At first appearance the physical face of the countryside with its rich, green farmland, shape-shifting light, wide skies and seascapes in harmony is essentially the same. But the landscape, which was clutter-free apart from pylons, is now swathed with wind turbines which have denatured the countryside. Several hundred of these towering superstructures are scattered across the hills as the wind energy industry strives to meet EU emissions targets.

Many parts of the west coast have also been infested with holiday homes and bungalows, twice as big and twice as numerous, built with little or no planning control. In 1991 the “Kerry brand” consisted of an unspoilt landscape and clean environment but the situation has changed dramatically since then. In the boom years, between 2002 and 2007, a staggering 17,600 homes were built in Kerry alone; 7,600 of these were one-off houses in the countryside.

Not only has the coastline been blighted, it is also suffering serious damage through storms with significant archaeological sites lost to nature in what is acknowledged as a catastrophic situation. Extreme weather is now the new normal. Since 2013, through relentless erosion, havoc has been wreaked on vulnerable sites with some washed away entirely. The unfolding scenario comprises stone forts falling into the sea, castles crumbling to the ground, collapsing masonry and piers. For the first time in centuries, shipwrecks, middens, fish traps, timber trackways and ancient drowned forests are being revealed. Early Christian burial grounds have been damaged with exposed graves yielding skulls, and skeletal remains littering parts of the shoreline. Beach profiles have been altered with some declared no-go areas.

On my original journey, phone boxes were shelters from where I reported to family and friends on my hitchhiking progress but in the 2010s they are an endangered species. Some cobwebbed ones have a decade’s worth of dead flies while the doors of others are tied with bailer twine or used for advertising. This trend is reversed in Castletownshend, west Cork, where the community has preserved its surviving concrete phone box. Telecom engineers wanted to replace it with a modern aluminium one, but a local man occupied it for a full day, thus saving an historic part of the built heritage.

In most towns the rhythm of the streetscape is largely unchanged, apart from Polish supermarkets taking their place alongside nail salons, beauty parlours and tapas bars. In the early nineties, the Celtic Tiger was some years off and parts of the west, and many hotels – along with their mattresses – were unchanged since the middle decades of the 20th century. The punt was the unit of currency, replaced in 2002 by euro notes and coins. Few people had personal computers and the soundtrack to office life was the clacking of manual typewriters. When I returned home from my coastal circumnavigation, I typed my manuscript using floppy disks on an Amstrad PCW 9512 – then the height of computing fashion.

Between 2007 and 2012 nearly 1,000 pubs closed throughout Ireland and one of the most significant social shifts has been from drinking in pubs to at home. Those pubs which survived reinvented themselves, serving food along with rolling news and sports coverage on monster widescreen televisions. And these days, beer mats caution “Smoking can damage your health” or “Drink sensibly and moderately”.

While many people still enjoy a drink, there is no question that coffee is the new wine. Ireland’s coastal cafes, filled with communal gossip and electro chatter, are places for the mass medication of the population. People are not just addicted to caffeine, they worship it; coffee-fuelled shopping is holding entire towns together and the cafe has become a community hub.

One animal too has endured over the years with remarkable longevity. In Dingle harbour, Fungie, who featured as one of the original sketches in my book, now sprouts grey whiskers. But despite his wrinkly throat and worn teeth, the town unashamedly continues to cash in on the seductive antics of a perpetually smiling male bottlenose dolphin. With his own statue, he is now referred to as “The Most Loyal Animal on the Planet”.

Since it opened in spring 2014, every trick in the book has been used to capitalise on the name of the Wild Atlantic Way. Businesses along what is classified as the world’s longest continuous driving route have embraced it, selling everything from WAW jewellery and candles to coffee, food and craft beer branded with the wave logo.

Peter Curtin, the owner of the Roadside Tavern in Lisdoonvarna, whose family have been in business since the 1800s, is positive about the route as an initiative. “In marketing terms,” he said, “it’s probably the smartest move that was ever made since the foundation of the state.”

But the owner of a guest house in Connemara, Lynn Hill, who runs the Anglers’ Return at Toombeola, believes there is a danger of it being over-exploited. “We might kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” she said. “They should let the route sell itself but not have every single shop and cafe named after it.”

Those running visitor centres too have reported an increase in trade since the route has been developed. Paddy Clarke, who owns the Slieve League Visitor Centre at Teelin in south Donegal, feels it has “democratised” the west of Ireland since Donegal – which has often felt left out of projects – now enjoys as much coverage as the traditional big-name destinations of Kerry, Connemara or the Burren.

“Democracy has finally come to Donegal and everywhere is now being promoted equally by Fáilte Ireland,” he said. “It’s a fair way of doing it and at least we are getting our share. We’ve noticed a big increase in the number of tour coaches coming to us which has coincided with a worldwide upsurge in tourism.”

The publication of Irish Shores in 1993 opened the door to further explorations around Ireland as I juggled full-time journalistic work with writing books. Slowly (for there is much research and ruminative thinking involved in penning a travel book) a trilogy followed, with The Height of Nonsense, Burren Country and Wandering Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way representing a small corpus of long journeys. Frequently, on my travels these days, I am told that the oul’ characters are all dead. “You should have been here 25 years ago,” is a familiar refrain. I was, and I met those characters, and a new generation has replaced them.

My trip drew to a close at Kinsale at a row of fishermen’s cottages known as World’s End. Its name comes from the location of World’s End Gate marked on early maps. It was reassuring to find that Kinsale still has as many pubs as in 1991. In the Spaniard, the plámás from the wisecracking philosophers is as reliable as ever. A historic spit and sawdust bar, it dates from 1703 with loose chippings sprinkled on the slate floor to soak up spillages. One of the regulars told me that when two Americans recently visited the bar, they were informed that the chippings were the remains of a furniture fight from the previous night; they hurriedly finished their drinks and left.

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