Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

We will not do that. The reason for setting up the expert group was to get the answers we needed to our questions within four months. I announced at the ploughing championships last September that I would not go to the Law Reform Commission. I stated that when we examined its proposal we thought we could short-circuit it and have a report by the end of April. Even if the Law Reform Commission had taken on the job, there is no possibility of its report being ready by the end of April. We have instead focused on the key issues and we are obtaining the expert legal advice. The Office of the Attorney General is involved in this expert group. The nature of legal advice is that until any such advice is tested in a court of law, one does not know whether it stands up.

I recently had a meeting with Comhairle na Tuaithe and we discussed the development of walkways and their maintenance, which is an important issue. All the parties engaged in a positive manner. I pay tribute to the members of Comhairle na Tuaithe who have moved this forward so far, considering where we all started from. These proposals were recently circulated for observation to the members of Comhairle na Tuaithe. People often confuse the issue of the walkways with the top of the mountain issue, but they are two separate issues that have become entangled. I have circulated my proposals on the walkways issue and I will await the response with interest. Before I circulated them I explained the general thrust of them to Comhairle na Tuaithe and I allowed it a few days to reply as to whether it considered them worth circulating. I hope this will progress the issue.

On the final issue, it is amazing that one can repeat something hundreds of times, and every time I repeated this statement I used the same formulation, that there will be no national State scheme of support for access. I deliberately used that formulation because it would be ridiculous if I, for example, prevented a local Leader company from purchasing or obtaining a lengthy lease on 100 metres of land relating to a monument or needed for access purposes. If I intervened in this way, people could say that I was using State money, directly or indirectly, having stated that no such money would be provided in respect of access. I am stating that there will be no scheme under which people will be paid a certain amount of money for access. I ruled out such a development from the beginning.

The Deputy also inquired about charging for entry. It is easy to state that one should never charge for access to land. However, one is charged for entry to Dublin Zoo, which is on land that is owned by somebody. One of the fundamental mistakes the Deputy could make would be to in some way infer that land that does not happen to be blessed by God with great fertility is any less owned by a farmer than that which is so blessed.

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