Madam, - The view of Ciaran Dolan of the ICMSA (July 7th) is quite constructive compared with the "not a square inch" attitude taken by other farm organisations.
Nonetheless, the ICMSA's bottom line, like the others', is that farmers should continue to have the absolute right to decide who comes on to their land, regardless of how remote or poor it is.
This is at the heart of the issue of access to the countryside. If every landowner is to continue to be given this right, there will never be a co-ordinated network of rights of way, no viable areas where people may roam freely, and consequently little of the infrastructure that walkers elsewhere take for granted, such as signposts, gates, stiles or guidebooks. All we would have would be an incoherent patchwork of some areas where walkers could go and others where they could not, and even the former could be withdrawn for any reason or none.
It is reasonable that farmers should be pressed to concede something on access. They are now getting grants of €300 a year per hectare merely for owning land, yet do not consider that they should give anything to their community or the State to facilitate walking tourism unless they are well paid for it.
All this is in stark contrast to what is happening elsewhere in Europe, where there is a fair legal balance between the rights of landowners and recreational users and where hill walking tourism is consequently thriving, while here it is in steep decline.
A few years ago, Minister Ó Cuív was sent out to solve the problem of access, obviously with the injunction that whatever he did he was not to suggest legislation to give rights to recreational users. In this he was, of course, supported by the farming organisations and, shamefully, by the Mountaineering Council of Ireland, which as always lined up behind the farmers. Once again it was left to Keep Ireland Open alone to articulate the recreational users' case. The Minister's Comhairle na Tuaithe, all too predictably, has produced nothing other than pious aspirations and wishful thinking.
Given this and the latest High Court judgment on Glencree, which once and for all demonstrated that so-called rights of way that are not signposted, not marked on the maps and not even recorded by the local authority are useless, it is high time for recreational users to start looking out for themselves.
After all, they can expect nothing from the farming organisations, the State, or even the major body supposed to represent them. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID HERMAN, Meadow Grove, Dublin 16.