Mr. John Mulligan:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for giving us the opportunity to bring our views to the table today. My name is John Mulligan. I am a journalist, author and newspaper columnist in the region and like Brendan and others, I have been a long-time campaigner for sustainable infrastructure in rural Ireland.

Having an interest in outdoor tourism, particularly walking tourism, I started to campaign in 2010 for a network of long walking and cycling trails in Ireland, similar to what is enjoyed as a matter of course by people in other countries. At that time, Ireland had around 70 km of trails, while Germany had 70,000 km of linked trails. Clearly, we were never going to persuade German tourists, the biggest customers in Europe for this product, to visit Ireland and spend a week cycling up and down the Mayo greenway, as somebody said at the time, like hamsters on a wheel.

We had some successes. Fáilte Ireland, initially opposed to such trails, conceded the merit in our case following market sampling in the main European markets.

Mr. John Martin, then CEO of Waterways Ireland, initially rejected a proposal to utilise disused towpaths on river and canal waterways; however, following repeated lobbying by us, he saw the potential and became a real champion for such development. The Royal and Grand Canal Way trails gave Ireland an immediate bounce into the market, delivering 270 km of ready-made access, all in public ownership.

Deputy Alan Kelly, as Mr. Brendan Quinn mentioned, was an early supporter of the logic of utilising linear corridors in State ownership to help develop areas in need of investment. The current Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, on being appointed transport Minister, met with me and immediately saw the potential benefit. He initiated the Dublin-Galway greenway on the Royal Canal and also the closed Mullingar-Athlone railway, with the intention of progressing it further towards Galway. The final section of this project is not yet complete, but we hope and believe it will happen.

Mr. Quinn and I identified linear corridors of State-owned lands as an early win in advancing our mileage of trails, and we have seen how this strategy has worked in Waterford and Limerick, for instance. The Waterford Greenway, mostly utilising closed railway alignments, attracts more than 250,000 unique visitors annually, as well as providing a leisure and commuting route for thousands of local families. It brings jobs, too. A former derelict cottage on the old line, a mile or so east of Dungarvan, is now the well-regarded Railway Kitchen. When I last looked, it was employing 32 people.

We tried for many years to persuade councillors in the west of Ireland to copy the success of these projects. A study carried out in Sligo found the payback time on investment on a greenway based on a closed rail line between Collooney and Bellaghy could be as little as five years, yet we have debated this issue for more than a decade, with strong opposition from councillors who believe a train on this route is imminent. It is not. Every official report over the decade has found no case for a railway. The figures on the Ennis-Athenry line are dismal but lobbyists boost them by adding in commuter numbers on the Athenry-Oranmore-Galway route, which is part of the existing Dublin-Galway line and has nothing to do with the western rail corridor. However, the experts refute the feasibility of building a line north of Athenry at this time. Lobbyists have sought to build a freight line, with no stations, but the most recent NWRA report on rail freight into Mayo showed the existing lines to be lightly used and with no requirement for another line. The lack of ambition shown by councillors and indeed Deputies in Mayo in seeking to build an unwanted railway to ship raw materials out of Mayo is a third-world approach to infrastructure provision. Round sawlog, which is what we are talking about, should not be shipped out of the west until it is processed into sawn timber, fuel or modular houses. Seeking to build a railway to create wealth outside the west is a negative approach to local governance. In any case, exports of high value nowadays are increasingly transmitted, not exported. In this digital age, harking back to being a source of raw materials for an empire elsewhere is hardly forward thinking.

The fact remains that no railway has been built on this route, between Athenry and Collooney, in the past decade, and it is very likely that the situation will be the same a decade from now. Given the short payback period and the crying need for local investment in neglected towns, logic dictates we should be building this infrastructure now. Apart from creating wealth now, making the region attractive to remote and high-paid workers and providing safe places for families to exercise, a greenway will halt the creeping land grab that is happening along the route and that has happened with too many such assets elsewhere. If a decision is made to build a railway in ten or 20 years, the asset will have been preserved.

At a meeting of an Oireachtas transport policy committee here in this building in February 2021, Mr. Jim Meade, CEO of Irish Rail, described greenways on closed and disused lines as a “win-win” given that they preserve the routes in public ownership, while the primary use of the asset will always be rail. This debate must not be seen as a rail-versus-trail debate but, rather, a debate on the best use of State-owned assets at this point. Mr. Quinn has told members what Irish Rail told Mayo County Council about a greenway north of Claremorris and how it has deliberately stopped this from happening.

Some 27,000 people in the region are crying out for this infrastructure. They see the benefits enjoyed in places like Kilmacthomas in Waterford and wonder why their councils, with the honourable exception of an enlightened Sligo, will not draw down the available money and just do what is required. If funding is made available for rail, we will take that too, with a greenway relocated to the edge of the alignment as a minor percentage of the cost of the rail project. However, the council needs to listen, and that is why we need the committee’s help.