Every year as summer turns to autumn, millions of Europeans visit historical monuments and sites in a continent-wide celebration of Europe’s rich and varied heritage, whether given to us naturally or crafted by human hands.
These European Heritage Days, a joint initiative of the European Union and the Council of Europe, have just been marked in Ireland by National Heritage Week, with a programme of some 1,700 events at cultural sites throughout the country. And as in previous years, thousands of people – both citizens and visitors – have taken the opportunity to explore an old castle or stately home or discover the real value of a raised bog or other important natural habitat.
Ireland’s heritage is part of what we are and includes everything we have embraced as our own, from mysterious megalithic sites such as Newgrange to the grand terraces of Georgian Dublin.
As President Michael D Higgins has noted, heritage "can be said to embrace all those elements of Irish life which we have inherited from the generations gone before us, and whose continuing survival into the future depends on the attitudes and actions of the present … When we speak of heritage today, we are talking about our interaction with the world around us, both real and abstract, our identity and our need to tell our own story in our own way."
Speaking last September at an event to mark the 20th anniversary of the Heritage Council, which he himself had a hand in establishing as minister for arts and culture, the President decried the devaluation of heritage by "association with a clichéd image of what was assumed visitors to Ireland wanted to see".
Such “utilitarian reductionism” was, in his view, “both blinkered and myopic and did not ascribe sufficient recognition or importance to much of our natural, built and cultural capital”. What’s needed, he said, was a more integrated approach based on the “vital connection between people and place… empowering local communities to use heritage to improve their sense of well-being and quality of life.”
It is in that context we must view such recent tragedies as the fires that destroyed Vernon Mount, on the outskirts of Cork city, and badly damaged Belcamp House, on the north side of Dublin, as well as the continuing neglect of Aldborough House, the last great Georgian mansion to be built in the capital. Yet Ireland's heritage ranks very low in terms of Government priorities and was among the first calls on public spending to be savagely cut when the State's coffers ran dry.
The Heritage Council, which by common consent has done so much valuable work with communities, had its budget slashed to negligible levels. And while some funding has since been restored, it can only be put on a stronger footing by allocating a much greater share for heritage from the proceeds of the National Lottery, on the model of the UK's Heritage Lottery Fund.