The coastal village of Stradbally in Co Waterford has been a multiple prize-winner in the National Tidy Towns competition and claims several awards for trees and flowers.
Now the local organising committee has announced that Stradbally may withdraw from the competition in which it successfully competed for 17 years.
The reason is its dismay at a current planning application for a large-scale pig unit in the vicinity. The committee claims this development would greatly damage the high-quality environment and local amenities, which have impressed the Tidy Towns judges and are enjoyed by people from all over Co Waterford and beyond.
Posters have been put up around the charming village green exhorting: "No Hogs on the Bog", and "Stradbally Says No to Queally Development". More than 200 people have attended a protest meeting which expressed vigorous and implacable opposition to the proposed development.
The Stradbally Environmental Protection Group has been formed to co-ordinate opposition. The Tidy Towns committee has notified its counterparts around the country, politicians and the sponsors of the competition that if planning permission is granted it will have no alternative but to withdraw.
"It is the unanimous belief of the committee that it would be pointless to continue in the face of such adversity," the committee wrote.
The application has been submitted by Mr John Queally, a prominent businessman and farmer who lives and farms at nearby Fenor, Co Waterford. It is for a 500-sow integrated pig unit at Rathmaskillogue, less than two miles from Stradbally.
The 10-acre development would involve the construction of nearly 11/2 acres of buildings and eventually house up to 12,000 pigs.
The opposition group claims that its impact on the neighbourhood would be catastrophic. Up to two million gallons of slurry would be created, and it is proposed to spread this on some 3,500 acres of the surrounding countryside, mainly permanent pasture and improved grasslands.
Local protesters insist that the area is a regionally important aquifer and is geologically unsuitable for this type of activity, because of the complicated nature of the underlying bedrock and the low permeability of the soils.
It is beyond question, they say, that there will be pollution of the network of streams and ditches feeding into the Tay and Mahon, which are salmon-spawning rivers and the source of the local water supplies.
They fear the creation of a noxious and possibly hazardous level of air and water pollution, and that the heavy traffic generated will place an intolerable strain on the already overloaded network of narrow roads in the area.
The slurry would be spread between March and October. "I don't see why we should be subjected to that in the middle of our tourist season," says Mr Peter Lanigan O'Keeffe, a spokesman for the group.
"Stradbally Cove is one of the great family beaches of the county. It's very safe and shallow, and thousands of families use it in the summertime," says Ms Margot Crowley, secretary of the protest group.
Mr Queally, with his brother, Peter, owns and operates the Dawn pork and bacon factory at Grannagh, on the Waterford-Kilkenny border. This plant has a throughput of 9,300 pigs a week, and the proposed development would guarantee a further 230 a week.
This, the developer argued in a submission to the county council, would increase the self-reliance of the plant and reduce current fluctuations in supply, "thus increasing throughput, profitability and job security at the plant".
The reasons the Stradbally area was chosen, the submission said, included the absence of any other pig unit there, a factor favourable to the establishment of a high-health pig unit. There is good farmland to allow spreading, and a suitable site for the disposal by burial of large numbers of pigs in the event of a Class A disease outbreak, it added.
The objectors strongly dispute the submission's claim that there is only one dwelling within 500 metres of the site, and they are convinced that it will be impossible to regulate and limit the spreading of so much slurry.
The developer has gone about preparing his application methodically. A statement on his behalf pointed out that the application is accompanied by a detailed Environment Impact Statement (EIS) which was prepared following a thorough environmental impact assessment.
As is required, an Integrated Pollution Control Licence application is being completed for submission to the Environmental Protection Agency. If this is granted, the county council's role in assessing the planning application will be confined to issues such as the visual impact of the buildings, the added pressure on infrastructure such as roads, and - to an extent - the views of the local community.
More than 200 objections have been lodged to the piggery, and the objectors claim that a number of the 27 landowners who originally agreed to take the slurry have now had second thoughts.
Four years ago the Queally organisation lodged an application for a pig unit at the same location. Again there was strong local opposition, the council sought more information, and the proposal was not proceeded with.
The pig industry is in an expansion phase, and it was probably inevitable that serious controversy would arise as larger pig units were proposed. Teagasc statistics show that, nationally, the output of the industry grew from 2.1 million pigs in 1987 to about 3.25 in 1996.
The organisation has said a million extra pigs produced would create more than 2,000 jobs, and all increased pig output would be exported, earning an estimated £15 million a year.
Significant market opportunities are likely to arise for Irish pig-meat in the EU market in the next few years, as a reduction in pig-meat production in some other member-states occurs, Teagasc calculated.
But the population of Stradbally and its environs insist that the sacrifice of their unique environment is too high a price to pay for such industrial development.
The IDA has said there is capacity to slaughter four million pigs in the State, but only about 3.25 million are currently being processed annually. It is calculated that the Queally operation controls almost 500,000 of the pigs being processed each year.
The picturesque coastal strip around Stradbally is a proposed National Heritage Area. As the debate about the pig project gathers momentum, it will reflect the strains caused on small rural communities and their environment by the constant drive in this and other industries to scale upwards in size to reduce costs, enhance competitiveness and increase profits.