Madam - So Malcolm Thompson of the Irish Cattle and Sheep-farmers Association reckons that farmers are not to blame for the disastrous fall in the numbers of walking tourists (The Irish Times, April 12th).
Mr Thompson knows full well that we live in a country with virtually no signposted rights of way and no area of private land where walkers can go without the possibility of a bruising encounter with an angry landowner. Nor is this just a remote possibility, since huge areas are cut off by offensive notices and endless miles of barbed wire. These are especially prevalent in Mr Thompson's Sligo, the county that also boasts a farmer convicted of assaulting walkers.
All this is in stark contrast to other European countries where walkers are made welcome, where there is a fair balance between their rights and the rights of landowners and where governments do more than bleat feebly about purely voluntary measures when faced with intransigence from farming organisations. In those countries landowners have some sense of community and, more importantly, realise that they owe something to the taxpayers without whose generous support they would not be able to live in a pleasant rural setting.
For example, in England and Wales there are legal rights of way and the freedom to roam, plus cross-compliance measures introduced in the recent CAP reforms to protect access to the countryside. These have helped to create a walking tourism business worth £6 billion sterling which provides about 250,000 full-time jobs. The policies of Mr Thompson's organisation and the the actions of his members have had the opposite effect in Ireland. - Yours, etc.,
MICHAEL CARROLL, Secretary, Keep Ireland Open, Pine Valley Avenue, Dublin 16.