What is the one single class of building which, if you deducted it from the Irish countryside, would be an irreparable loss?
It's not the great houses, because they are usually hidden up long driveways; and it's not thatched cottages, because they have by now all been levelled to make way for bungalows. It is in fact those Church of Ireland churches, which must make the hearts of even sworn heathens soar in their rib-cages, as they round a bend and see the elegant spire rising amid a thicket of oak and beech.
Towers, Spires and Pinnacles by Sam Hutchison (Wordwell, €25) is a delightful tribute to those churches, which cling onto existence with the tenacity of lichen: for the congregations of many of them have long been falling, and for the most part they are of an age which calls for drastic remedies. No doubt it was because so many medieval churches had reached a similar point in the cycle of decay and renewal during 19th-century times that the Victorians were able to impose their will on the ancient with such a heavy contemporary hand.
Many of the surviving churches of the Anglican tradition which were new in the early 19th century have reached that point now; but there is no longer the pot of capital to rescue and restore these buildings. Local communities do their best, and happily, the restoration of the Church of Ireland buildings tends very much to be a cross-community affair. Whether or not small Irish communities can continue to sustain churches of two traditions is another question.
Most of the rural Protestant churches of Ireland probably date from the "First Fruits" period in the first half of the 19th century: this was the last great period of parish church building in Ireland. A further period of vigorous church building occurred in the 1960s. This was of Catholic churches - and almost without exception the buildings that resulted were tasteless concrete barns, the ecclesiastical equivalent of the huge, ugly domestic Palazzi Gombini which have desecrated the Irish countryside in the past 20 years. We could bulldoze the lot, and be none the poorer: and God meanwhile would be tap-dancing with delight in heaven that we had finally seen sense.
But he cherishes the Church of Ireland churches, for they retained the cruciform structure which the Catholics in a fit of tasteless lunacy abandoned. That the most celebrated - and also the best - church architect of the period, Liam McCormick, based his designs on pagan themes says something of what was going on in the corporate Catholic mind at the time.
(I wonder: is there some kind of sub-conscious connection between the abandonment of classical church design and the simultaneous growth of child abuse by Catholic priests?)
Sam Hutchison toured Ireland, photographing every Church of Ireland church in the country; and though by the standards of mainland Europe and of England, our selection of early churches is modest enough, they nonetheless seem to form a series of carefully selected co-ordinates around which the Irish countryside arranges itself.
Of course, these churches were not merely places of worship; they were symbols of power and of loyalty at times when the wrong decision would be ended with a broadsword or the executioner's block. So who cannot applaud dear old Bishop Myler McGrath, who is buried at Cashel, and who managed to be Protestant Bishop of Clogher at the same that he was Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor? He married twice, and lived until he was 99. He was also chairman of the local Sinn Féin Cumann, was colonel of a battalion of the UDR, and was rabbi in the local Buddhist mosque. Not many people know that.
But closest to my own heart are those damp little Protestant churches in the middle of a damp stand of broadleaf trees in a damp meadow, with the little blue board outside, and inside, a fading wreath of poppies. Such places are usually kept going by a famished curate who earns a guinea a week, who eats every second Saturday, and who gets round all 15 churches in his parish in a 1972 Hillman Hunter, occasionally pausing to gnaw on the (bald) spare Dunlop radial.
However, there are other Church of Ireland churches which are places of great beauty and architectural opulence - most notably Waterford Cathedral, and most magnificent of all, St Fin Barre's cathedral, Cork. It is inconceivable that these churches could be under any threat, for they are central to the architectural heritages of those places they grace with their presence. It is those other churches I worry about - in unexpected places in Carlow and Kilkenny, Longford and Limerick, with their plaques to long dead colonels, and memorials to now vanished families.
In only the most literal and unimaginative sense are these "Protestant" churches. For they now belong to us all. They are places where members of the local community gathered: here they married, and here they mourned; here were they baptised and here were they buried. They are testaments to the complexity of Irish life and to the variety of strands that go into what it is to be Irish.
Might we not have been a happier and wiser people if we had a few more Myler McGaths about the place, and a few less of our driven purists?
If you're interested in Sam Hutchison's exquisite book - and I know of no finer guide to the wonderful Church of Ireland churches - you can ring Wordwell at 01-2765221, or visit its website, www.wordwellbooks.com.