Island estate going private again

THE news that a luxury hotel has opened at Fota in Cork harbour has stirred recollections of that beautifully wooded island estate and what has come to pass there.

In the mid 1970s, a Mrs Bell (nee Smith-Barry), who owned the island, essentially gave the 780-acre Fota estate to the people of Cork.

While she sold it to UCC for a nominal sum, I believe it is more correct to say she gave it to Cork’s foremost public institution and that her intention in doing so was to ensure that her lovely estate would become a public resource in perpetuity.

The circumstances in which the greater part of that public resource pretty swiftly came once again to be in private ownership are still largely unknown to the public because of the passage of time and the quite normal secrecy of those involved in entirely legal transactions. Since then the ‘development’ of Fota has gone on apace — first one golf course, then another, and now the hotel. There is also a website advertising many ‘exclusive’ golfing lodge-style houses. The irony of marketing Fota on the basis of exclusivity, when so brave and generous an attempt had been made to render the entire island a green and wooded oasis of public inclusivity, is evidently lost on the developers and their copywriters.

I daresay that future generations of Corkonians will feel more keenly than we do for what has been lost. They will inhabit an environment even more built up than ours. For them an island of 780 acres set aside as a public nature reserve of old-growth deciduous woodland would have seemed like a jewel dropped from Heaven into Cork harbour. But we are left to contemplate only what is and what might have been.

Stan Reynolds

The Old Schoolhouse

Toames West

Macroom

Co Cork