Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

A coastal walkway will help to prevent flooding in Dundalk and Blackrock while brining immense benefits to tourism and all facets of recreation and addressing the obesity epidemic. As a member of the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children and rapporteur on the issue of obesity, I feel obliged to remind the House that, while we are making appreciable inroads in the task of stabilising some health problems such as our drink culture and smoking, one of our principal health problems - obesity - is growing at an alarming rate.

As a member of the Committee on Health and Children, I am more exposed on a daily basis to the health and financial time-bomb that the growing level of obesity in our population, particularly the youth population, represents. I urge all Deputies to become more aware at their local levels of this ticking bomb and to be more proactive in trying to initiate, in conjunction with their local authority members and managements, local policies, strategies and projects to address this burgeoning problem.

By way of example, in my town of Dundalk I have taken an initiative to catalyse our local council into action so as to provide an extension of our local Slí na Sláinte network. A group of committed local environmental activists recently brought to my attention the fact that our only existing riverside walk, which is just under 2 km in length, could easily be extended to link with an existing heavily overgrown earthen embankment that runs along the high water mark of Dundalk Bay for some 4 km from Dundalk to Blackrock. Although this earthen embankment was built almost three centuries ago, it has lasted - almost completely unmaintained - right up to the present. However, it is suffering the ravages of time and tide and, because it provides protection from tidal flooding to more than 3,500 homes and business premises, we must act urgently and decisively to enhance its flood risk mitigation capacity.

Obviously, my primary interest in connecting our Navy Bank walk to our Dundalk-Blackrock embankment is the Slí na Sláinte potential of the 6 km walkway-cycleway that would be created by joining the embankments and servicing and upgrading them. However, the additional flood risk mitigation for 3,500 homes and business premises that would be secured by the implementation of this strategy is even more important.

The initiative I have taken in co-operation with community volunteers, acting pursuant to the provisions of sections 66 and 67 of the Local Government Act 2001 and in joint venture with Dundalk Town Council and Louth County Council, seeks to provide protection for the Dundalk southern inter-tidal marshland and mud flat area of the EU-designated Dundalk Bay special protection area, SPA, Natura 2000 site, which is an internationally significant feeding and roosting habitat for indigenous and migratory water fowl and other birds. An equally important objective of my initiative is to enhance significantly the flood risk mitigation capacity of the existing Lord Limerick earthen embankment.

The third element of the proposal is to add the long aspired to Dundalk-Blackrock coastal walkway-cycleway Slí na Sláinte to the recreational tourism amenity public infrastructure offering of the north east by heightening, strengthening and extending the embankment and equipping it with appropriately sited, heavily camouflaged ornithological observation posts. It is also envisaged that a moat barrier will be constructed to prevent the increasing and undesirable intrusion by dogs, anti-social elements, hunters and so forth onto the salt marshes and mud flats, thereby allaying the concerns that have been identified and enumerated in various expert studies and reports over the past 20 years. This will be done through the implementation of the strategy that has been developed and proposed by the Louth Environmental Group.

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