PJ Murphy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Five weeks on from Storm Éowyn, I wish to raise the extent of the damage that was done to our built heritage in the west of Ireland by that storm. Between the counties of Galway, Clare, Mayo and Roscommon, it is estimated that we have approximately 400,000 km of dry stone walls on our roadsides and around our fields. That is enough wall to run the length of the equator ten times over. It is by a long way the largest stone wall network in the world. In kilometre terms, it consists of about nine times more wall than the Great Wall of China when it was at its peak. Our stone walls are currently in tatters and on the ground after the storm. The reconstruction job for many farmers will be a mammoth task. I worry that for many elderly farmers the task may be just too great and that, if unassisted by the State, these walls will simply lie where they currently are, on the ground. I call on the Minister for agriculture and the Minister for heritage to sit down together on this. I call on them to put together, as a matter of urgency, a package to help with the cost of rebuilding these walls. Just like our Georgian buildings in Dublin and Limerick, our stone walls in the west are an important part of our built heritage, and once gone they will not be replaced.

I also wish to speak about the additional funding that is needed by the local authorities in these western counties for road-widening projects. Roadside walls are being taken out and replaced with chain-link fencing simply because that is all that Department funding allows for. Over the past 15 years we have countless examples where, as part of work through the CIS, active travel or the building of footpaths or greenways, stone walls have been removed by local authorities and not replaced. I want to see a policy implemented for all local authorities for stone walls similar to that for hedgerows, that is, where you remove a metre, you replace a metre. That will cost money, and this money simply must be made available to the western local authorities through the Departments with responsibility for the environment and local government. I would appreciate feedback from the Minister on this request.