Sir, – Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly has attracted some criticism over the weekend for apparently over-ruling civil servants when deciding on spending on greenways, specifically with regards to the route along the disused rail line that links Mullingar to Athlone.
For too long planning of walking and cycling infrastructure has been too localised, with short bits of trails going from nowhere to nowhere and often seemingly designed to do nothing more than allow TDs to be seen to fund local projects.
I welcome the fact that a Minister had the courage to over-ride such small-minded thinking and allocate funds to allow for the construction of Ireland’s first long greenway linking Dublin to Galway, of which Mullingar-Athlone is an integral part.
Cycling tourism is a huge growth area worldwide, with cycling often described as the new golf.
A Fáilte Ireland survey in 2006 found that we had no penetration in this market, but nothing was done by successive ministers in the interim.
Survey data from this year shows that 11.5 million German tourists alone would consider taking a cycling holiday in Ireland if we had sufficient mileage of interconnected infrastructure. Because of lack of vision by government, we have just a few short cycle trails that only sustain local amenity and short-stay cycling; nobody is going to spend a week cycling up and down the Great Western Greenway like a hamster in a wheel, nice and all as that short trail may be.
Any notion that tourists or Irish leisure cyclists are interested in holidaying along main roads is clearly delusional, but that thinking still drives much of our tourism policy. We lack the off-road infrastructure that is the norm elsewhere.
That Mr Kelly had the courage and the foresight to map out a trail right across the country as a way of getting us started in this lucrative business, bringing jobs and local amenities to dozens of small places, is something to be lauded, not criticised. – Yours, etc,
JOHN MULLIGAN Kiltycreighton Boyle, Co Roscommon