De Valera starts search for acceptable visitor facilities for Burren park

The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, has initiated the formal process to identify alternative visitor facilities for the Burren National Park.

This emerged yesterday, two years after Government plans for visitor facilities at Mullaghmore were turned down.

As a result of the long-running Mullaghmore saga, Government plans to provide access to the national park became ensnared in the legal and planning process throughout the 1990s before An Bord Pleanála finally refused planning permission for the Mullaghmore centre in March 2000.

Last year, on foot on a High Court order, Government contractors demolished the incomplete visitor centre, begun in 1993, and restored the area to its original condition.

Ms de Valera has now initiated the search for alternative facilities in north Clare, after advertising EU-wide for tenders for a consultancy study for the provision of visitor facilities at the national park.

A spokesman for the Minister yesterday defended the two-year wait in starting the formal process in identifying alternative facilities.

Pointing out that the campaign to provide facilities for the Burren National Park "has been a source of argument for well over a decade now", he said: "Any study on the options that may exist will be seriously compromised unless it is based on broad and inclusive public consultation, taking account of all shades of opinion, and particularly those of local people and communities.

He continued: "For this to happen, there must be positive and constructive engagement by all sides to the debate, and the Minister believes that the required level of engagement would have been quite difficult to achieve before now, and until it became possible to consider things more dispassionately and objectively."

He added that the purpose of the study "is to get a result that everyone could live with happily, rather than accentuate the strong differences that have existed in the community".

The two-year wait to initiate the study makes it certain that the Minister - who is also a Clare TD - will not have to make a final decision on the contentious question of where the new visitor facilities should be situated during the term of the present Government.

In tendering, contractors have been asked to take account that visitor access must be achieved without any significant damage to the ecological integrity of the national park, and that any proposed location will have to be compatible with the planning requirements of Clare County Council.

The Burren Action Group successfully opposed plans to locate the visitor centre at Mullaghmore.

A spokesman said yesterday: "What we need to get right are the location and management practices of future facilities. An open and imaginative approach can still deliver a solution of which we can all be proud.

"Despite the previous controversy, much good dialogue and research has taken place over the past decade. If the new consultation reflects the needs of the host people and the host environment as well as the visitor, I'm sure all parties will play a positive role."