From Wicklow and the Gearagh wetland in County Cork to Connemara and the Burren, our island possesses landscapes as magnificent and precious as anywhere else in Europe. It isn’t sufficient, however, to wonder at their beauty, boast about these priceless assets in advertising material designed to attract tourists from abroad, and then do nothing of any significance to ensure that they’re protected. That has been the pattern in Ireland for far too long.

Our special report today highlights the findings of an independent consultants’ study of the state of country’s national parks and reserves. Taken together, it’s a disturbing picture.

The Burren stands out, if only because it is alone in having a management plan, albeit one that has yet to be signed off. Connemara’s visitor centre is run down, and the park doesn’t include the full 12 Twelve Bens range. Killarney has problems with deer herds, rhododendrons and the European Commission, which is following up a complaint alleging that the state is failing to protect native oaks, and pressing proceedings against the government for its tardiness in designating special conservation areas. Ballycroy – the most recent addition to the national parks list and Ireland’s first internationally-recognised Dark Sky zone – has a problem with conifer planting, which is not supposed to happen in areas designated as wilderness. Glenveagh has been damaged by over-grazing by deer herds and illegal turf-cutting. There are problems in the Wicklow Mountains National Park, where it’s feared that sheep farming, illegal mountain and quad biking, commercial forestry and inadequately managed vegetation burning are damaging wildlife habitats and eroding bogs.

Good it certainly isn’t, especially when compared to the approach to these matters seen in England, Wales and Scotland, where the often conflicting interests of environmental protection, tourism and farming in national parks are weighed vigilantly and more often than not wisely, and found to be compatible in England and Wales with a statutory Right to Roam. The struggle for the right of city workers to enjoy pure air, hills and moorland — then accessible only for grouse shooting for a week a year — began in 1932, when some 500 ramblers set out from Sheffield and Manchester to walk — illegally — to Kinder Scout, the plateau of what was to become the Peak District National Park.

Where is the promise by our government of such a right in Ireland? We see it not. There is instead, from the Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht ministry, a “transformative” ten-year so-called tourism masterplan for the national parks and reserves, a plan about which the Irish Wildlife Trust has been justifiably disdainful, in part because the government continues to dodge the core problem facing national parks: the absence of a legal status that sets out comprehensively the obligations and powers of the authorities — chiefly the National Parks and Wildlife Service — that are supposed to manage them.

The emphasis in the government’s plan is on increasing facilities for tourists. There is nothing wrong with that as a goal, except that it misses the point: if the parks are not protected now, there will over the years be less and less for tourists to see and enjoy. It’s an argument that would have been understood by one of America’s great landscape photographers and environmental campaigners, Ansel Adams, whose work — dismissed by indifferent state and federal governments, notably the one led by Ronald Reagan – was instrumental in reviving the conservation movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

“Once destroyed,” he warned, “nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.”