As Neil Jordan celebrates his recent marriage, his objection to a planned west Cork development has left a sour taste with locals. Kathy Sheridan reports
Notwithstanding certain tabloid boasts about "exclusive access" to the arrangements for Neil Jordan's wedding celebrations, it's only fair to point out that the information was freely available on his own website.
So freely that the infants of Castletownbere, Co Cork, were quoting the description of the idyllic setting of Waterfall House - "A summer full moon/In an Irish sky/Beside the waterfall/That leads us to sea" - that accompanies the invitation to join the happy couple at their celebratory garden party and dinner today, for which guests are advised to dress "gardenish . . . Heels could prove to be a problem. Togs (swimming suits) and Solpadine" are recommended for tomorrow afternoon's follow-up, a "very casual barbecue" at the film director's dazzling retreat on the water's edge.
Given the week that was in it, however, the adults of Castletownbere were taking a more jaundiced view, in particular of the website's injunction to - "Please note that the area is not renowned for it's [sic] luxurious accomodation \. Call it rustic charm." Through local eyes, already smarting at An Bord Pleanála's upholding of Jordan's appeal against a €10 million holiday home and leisure development in the derelict Wheel Inn holiday park along the strand from Waterfall House, the patronising comment was another slap from the man known to cherish his freedom to walk the streets in peace during his infrequent stays, and to leave the modest gates of Waterfall House open night and day.
On Thursday, after a local radio interview with a "deeply angry" Fianna Fáil TD Denis O'Donovan, the County Sound presenter gave out Jordan's website address - "Just have a look . . ." But no one in Beara needed further goading.
Feelings were already running so high around the town against the "outsider", with extreme threats in the air, that community activists were trying to dampen things down. "Betrayal" was one of the more printable comments. The least threatening was a normally genial trader who swore he would evict Jordan if he appeared near the premises.
In many ways, this week Beara became a microcosm of the ferocious planning and cultural clashes that have resounded across rural Ireland in recent years.
In the case of the Wheel Inn development, the only objectors to the revised plan - twice approved by Cork County Council - were two occasional visitors who live six hours' drive away, in Dublin.
Apart from Jordan, a Dalkey resident, the other was Roibeard MacGiollarnaith, with an address in Glenmaroon Road, Dublin 20, who is believed to own a house on the land side of the road, overlooking the bay.
Through his Cork solicitor, Jordan listed nine objections relating to scale, design, visual impact, water supply, risks to groundwater, noise impact, uncertainty about eventual use of the houses and, crucially, uncertainty about whether the swimming-pool, a "key component . . . which would bring an element of planning gain, bringing benefits to the community as well as to the developer" would ever be built. "It is notable that the local authority did not impose a completion bond to ensure the pool would be built. The balance between a large-scale house development (of minimal community benefit) and a pool (of significant community benefit) is lost . . ."
If, indeed, the pool was the main issue, Jordan and the community would have been at one. Locals, says Fine Gael councillor and postmaster Noel Harrington, had misgivings and obtained a legal covenant from the developer, John Burke, to the effect that "the pool and ancillary services" would be "completed simultaneously and contemporaneously with the said holiday homes".
At a meeting last year with three people representing the developer and the community, Jordan, as confirmed by his recent statement, agreed to reconsider his objections and decided to withdraw them, "the sole reason" for this being the "prospect of such an amenity in the area". At that very cordial meeting, according to participants, several telephone numbers were handed to Jordan and his partner for use if further issues arose. A June 2003 letter from the developer's engineer, intended to allay a number of concerns, went unanswered.
This is why Jordan's appeal, when it was lodged in February, came as such a shock locally. An Taisce, a party to the first appeal, didn't feature in the second, which suggested to the locals that it was dropping its objections. It was doing no such thing, said a spokesperson this week, it was just happy to allow others in the locality to pursue the issue. (Its "observations" are included in An Bord Pleanála's report, mainly criticising the inappropriateness of the "urban estate" design). Nonetheless, at the time it appeared that the two main objectors had left the field.
So why did Jordan change his mind? There is serious conflict on this point. Jordan has claimed that he asked for a developer's covenant after that meeting to ensure that the pool would be built. None of the other three present recalls such a request. The developer, John Burke, writing to Jordan through his lawyers, hotly denied ever receiving such a request - claiming to have first heard about it in a newspaper - and pointed to numerous attempts to contact Jordan by phone and letter in which he offered to "gladly listen" to any proposal he might make, including the signing of any covenant to be drafted by Jordan or his lawyers. And there it rests . . . and this view might explain why the word "betrayal" peppers the Beara air.
As for the second objector, from Dublin 20, his main concern, according to his written appeal, was that the development would result in the "permanent destruction" of the rural environment. "It is because of this rural environment that we have cherished our home that has been in our family for generations . . ." The Beara Action Group website gives him short shrift. "Locals know of no such person . . . When did/is he doing the 'cherishing'?"
And thus was the scene set for the classic conflict: the "people from Dublin with everything they need on their doorstep, who come down here a few times a year" versus the natives who have ploughed the seas and furrows for generations, who maintained life and hope in those officially abandoned outposts through the hungry years, now trying to balance the lovely accident of their environmental heritage with the need to keep family close and make a decent living.
There seemed a fine irony in the timing of O'Donovan's radio appearance on Thursday. While most of south county Dublin was queuing up for a jolly inaugural ride on the Luas, and Jordan and his bride were boarding another city train to his remote country retreat, only west Cork listeners could hear O'Donovan explaining that "this [Wheel Inn] project is every bit as important to west Cork and Beara as the Luas is to Dublin."
Plainly, to rural politicians, fresh from an election where planning issues constantly smacked them on the nose, the week's events were an amalgam of their worst political nightmares. For the people of Beara - and any remote community eking a living from a rapidly waning fishing and agricultural economy - this is personal. "What could be more personal than to see the population around you halve in 50 years?" asks a local trader.
"Down here, you've two choices if you're a school-leaver," says Harrington. "If you want a qualification you go to Cork and that's two hours' drive away so you're gone from Monday to Friday. Or you go out the harbour's mouth [on the fishing boats]. And then you're gone Monday to Friday anyway."
The story takes flesh on Friday evenings as busloads of young people coming home for the weekend are disgorged in the town at the same time as the rich burghers of Cork city are hurtling towards their second homes which, in Harrington's estimation, account forat least two out of five houses in the Allihies alone. One mother says she is "broken-hearted" at "the scattering" of her children from Beara. Whether Burke and his Wheel Inn holiday park, with its proposed 41 holiday houses, clubhouse and swimming-pool three miles from Castletownbere, could have wrought the economic magic required to keep her children at home is debatable.
Distant voices sigh irritably that "this project has been hyped up as if it were going to produce a new Tir na nÓg, a golden era for Castletownbere . . . when the only certainty about it is that it would lead to the enrichment of one individual".
The certainty, however, is that Beara desperately needs wet-weather facilities to hold on to its tourists and extend the short season. This is why a swimming-pool became a holy grail and why the community rowed in behind John Burke. "It would bring us on to the next stage," says John Murphy of Beara Tourism.
Meanwhile, schoolchildren must take a two-hour round trip to get swimming lessons in Bantry. The Rinn na Mara fishery trainees have to travel to Dunmanway, 45 miles away, for pool training.
Although the Cametringane Hotel in the town has just had more than €2 million lavished on it, it still lacks the leisure centre that routinely accompanies such upgradings. And the attractive, solid old town has no community centre, no cinema, no bowling alley and it feels the impact of the law that says no child under 18 is allowed in a pub after 9 p.m. Castletownbere can't perform miracles, despite a vibrant Beara Action Group. Money is so tight, they say, that the planned community centre had to be sacrificed for a school sports hall. Anyway, says Murphy, the catchment area is too small for serious commercial developments - "We're just 4,000 people. If you're a potential businessman, you have to think of your returns at the end of the day. This project was going to be our big opportunity."
As the week moved on, community leaders were trying hard to move the focus from Jordan back to An Bord Pleanála which, after all, is the body responsible for the refusal. "I would hate to see Jordan and MacGiollarnaith hung out to dry on this," says Murphy. "An Bord Pleanála has to take responsibility."
Denis O'Donovan, the TD who chaired the all-party committee on property rights in the Constitution (a report deemed "brilliant" by An Taisce), agrees with Murphy. What his committee found, he says, was a "complete absence of faith in the planning process, right across the board. I'm almost 20 years in public life and I never had any respect or faith in Bord Pleanála. I've seen a dozen instances where its own inspectors recommended a project and the board, in a very undemocratic and draconian way, overruled its own inspector . . . I have the feeling that they're living in a cocoon and that their knowledge of what is required in rural Ireland is extremely curtailed. Sooner or later they have to be restrained."