The Sunday Independent

A few years ago, the philosopher EF Schumacher propounded the idea that small was beautiful. He had a point and in a world where a new brutalism was becoming everywhere apparent -- in the scale of commercial enterprise, in architecture, in the size of our cities -- he soon had a following. But not so much in Ireland. In Ireland we were fed up of small. We were, we were endlessly told, a small nation and we came from small farms on a small island where small shops served our needs in the small towns and cities which were our typical urban centres. Nor did small is beautiful seem to make much sense as an aesthetic doctrine. Why should it? But you may think that it made and makes at least as much sense as its opposite, a fact which it is necessary to emphasise just now because in Ireland at this very moment we seem to be moving fast towards a general view that Big is Beautiful without reservation or further qualification. In fact, judging from a lot of what is admired merely for being big, aesthetics has very, very little to do with it.