Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am very concerned that because of the lack of importance attached to rural recreation and also the fact that it is at the moment being done on a permissive basis that landowners might do something that would seriously upset the apple cart and set back the situation by five or six years to a time when people put up signs on their farms to say “No Access”. That very nearly happened at the latter end of 2012 when the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine proposed to introduce commonage framework plans that would have been totally unacceptable to farmers and would have meant a huge loss of income for many of them. My guess is that if the Department had done that without consultation that farmers would have decided in its absence that they would withdraw permissive access. As the witnesses are aware, there is no arrangement on 99% of hills; people just go there because farmers allow them.

The effect of that would be terrible on the rural recreation scene, but particularly on rural tourism in the year of The Gathering. If such a thing happened, the consequences in terms of loss of money would be very significant. I understand that the number of visitors who said that walking was one of the activities in which they engaged while in Ireland reduced from 500,000 to 200,000. While I do not know the most recent figures, it was a growing activity and was considerably more important than golf for tourism.

I am surprised that the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine has not engaged in consultation with Comhairle na Tuaithe on its plans for hill farmers. This committee should ask the Department to meet Comhairle na Tuaithe to discuss the implications of its plans for commonages. I know we will be discussing commonages again on rural recreation because there is no point in doing damage to work that has been painstakingly done by all the members of Comhairle na Tuaithe since its establishment in 2004. That is nine years of hard work getting people to reach agreement. If that agreement were to be lost, the whole thing would fall apart. We shied away from legal prescription because it would have been too difficult to do and one would never have got agreement for it. Most people accept that how it has been done has worked well. However, it is always subject to somebody doing something stupid which raises the ire of hill farmers.