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

The one part of the equation is that these landowners do not have anything saying what is going to be done by the Department and what the Department is asking for in return is to give access to the hill. That does not seem to have got down to the individual farmer. The Department may be talking to groups but it is not talking to the people who own this land outright, each one of them. They have a title to it and even if it is 50 owners in the one piece, they are all individual owners and there does not seem to have been direct contact with them on the agreement, asking if they agree to give access, on the dotted line, and that the Department will give all of these things, including insurance cover and so forth.

More important than the insurance cover is to say that the Department will fight all of the cases if anybody brings a challenge because that is the issue. The chances of anybody winning a challenge on a hill is virtually nil unless somebody was crazy. In any event, any area which would have anybody who is going to be that crazy should not be included in the mountain access scheme. The problem is the amount of effort, time and money that would be spent defending the case; that would be where the insurance policy looks to me to be good but the landholders do not have it. I managed to get it through a farming organisation but the farmers who own the land do not have it.