Killarney Town Council is to seek a meeting with the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, over the poor state of Killarney National Park. The move was decided at this week's monthly council meeting.
The run-down state of the park has been discussed every month and several meetings between council representatives and Dúchas management locally have not led to an improvement.
Most of the "prime beauty spots", which draw tourists to Killarney, are within the 25,000-acre park. But there is a litany of complaints about those beauty spots.
Councillors listed the closed toilets at Torc waterfall, the second most popular visitor attraction after Muckross House; the rundown state of Dinis cottage and its lack of toilet facilities; the overgrown surrounds of Ross Castle; and pathways in Knockreer that are over-grown and impassable.
"If Dúchas don't want to take responsibility for the park they should hand it over to the council," said Cllr Sean Counihan, who proposed the meeting with Mr Cullen.
"There seems to be no effort by the people in Dúchas to keep their property. Dinis, the pride of Killarney, is closed. The whole situation with Dúchas needs looking into. They control all the prime beauty spots and they seem to have lost interest," said Mr Michael Courtney, chairman of Cork Kerry Tourism.
The concerns over the park were all the greater because the green belt surrounding it was diminishing rapidly, said Cllr Pat F. O'Connor.
Councillors agreed that lack of resources for the national park seems to be the underlying problem together with the "apparent inertia of Dúchas". They intend to ask Mr Cullen for more money for the park's upkeep.
Meanwhile, plans for the renovation of Dinis cottage have been costed by the Office of Public Works. It is understood that approximately €500,000 will be needed for this work alone.
Mr Paddy O'Sullivan, regional manager with Dúchas in Killarney, said everything that could be done had been done with the limited amount of money it had for the national park.
"But it costs staggering amounts of money to do up old buildings and such. We can't do these things piecemeal. We have to do things on a long-term basis," he said.
The priority now was to get Killarney House on stream.
Innovative ways would have to be found to deal with some of the problems, and Dúchas would have to look, perhaps, into public-private partnerships because of the amounts of monies involved, Mr O'Sullivan said.