Tracing the Shannon from its source to its future

ANOTHER LIFE:ETHNA'S DAD was born on the farm in Co Cavan where the Shannon is supposed to rise.

We have an old family snap of him at the famous Shannon Pot, with its shadowy rim of willow and blackthorn (a good video of it is at www.lookaroundireland.com). Like every other local, Seamus knew that the river’s source is actually shared with another river that flows through the valley, but the wonderfully dark pool of the Pot, rising and falling with the rainfall, even spurting up sometimes in the middle, as water surges up through the limestone – made it the obvious spot for legend. It’s given us a family interest, apart from the ecological one, in what happens to the Shannon on its long, slow ride to the sea.

At its smart, new website (www.heritagecouncil.ie), the Heritage Council offers viewers a great folder of information about the state of the Shannon, its landscapes and townscapes, including nearby stretches of the Grand and Royal canals. After five Shannon Waterway Corridor Studies, it offers management plans for a sensitive and priceless one-fifth of Ireland, “a geographic entity in socio-economic and heritage terms”, which the Council insists has been put at risk by piecemeal decisions and uncoordinated agencies.

More than 1,850 downloadable pages (with pictures) detail the Shannon’s strengths and vulnerabilities, its openings for development, and the threats to its scenery, wildlife and character. A clickable map brings up individual locations – Lough Allen, Lanesborough, Killaloe, wherever – with what needs to be done and who should do it.

There’s encouraging involvement by Waterways Ireland (the all-island “guardian” of this sector) and local authorities the length of the river, together with a conscientious spread of consultation. But reading the studies, carried out in the final years of the boom, the message has to be that it probably ended just in time.

In 2006 I found myself in Venice at the time of a huge international architectural Biennale exhibition on the future of the city.

In a well-admired Irish pavilion, a team of architects confronted what they called “a global case study in extreme suburbanisation” and offered models and maps of “super-rural” visions of alternative development. Among these, twin ribbons of low-density housing ran down each side of the Shannon, with islands of amenities floating up and down in between the towns, like Venetian barges, to bring a weekly “urban buzz” to a quarter of a million people.

We weren’t heading quite that far in the tiger years, but not, perhaps, for lack of trying. The Shannon’s floodplains have left big margins of farmland, marsh and bog virtually roadless along the river, but wherever access and planning permission allowed, the one-off second homes and bank-edge apartment blocks, private jetties and mini-marinas had begun to crowd together.

Between 1998 and 2004, development was promoted along the Upper Shannon by a Rural Renewal Tax Incentive Scheme, meant to build on the new tourism generated by linking the Shannon with the Erne. In Leitrim and Roscommon, planning applications doubled, but without the extra resources or research for sound decisions. In its work on the canal link with the Erne, the ESB went out of its way to protect natural ecosystems and bank vegetation, but the example went largely unheeded elsewhere on the Shannon, not least in the ribboning spread of Athlone.

One of the Heritage Council’s hopes is to draw built development away from the river banks to the towns and villages of the immediate hinterland, while helping waterside communities in their plans for tourist paths, linear parks, moorings, public loos, and so on. Indeed, the studies urge a regional park based on Lough Ree and following the French model that controls and integrates rural development while leaving private land ownership intact. In Ireland, unfortunately, no such State mechanism exists.

Fragmentation of the bankside natural habitats by buildings, jetties and drainage works adds to the pressures on wildlife stemming from pollution and the rapid rise in river traffic by larger, faster vessels.

Boats registered for Shannon navigation have risen from 1,000 in 1992 to some 7,500 last year, but services have not kept pace.

The impact of alien species imported with boats (notoriously the zebra mussel, and now a freshwater shrimp from the Caspian) has been a special concern of the Lough Derg Science Group, a team of independent scientists based at Nenagh, Co Tipperary. Far from resenting tourism, they would love to bring back the steamers that once attracted thousands to the Shannon's largest lake. But, like the Heritage Council, they urge a comprehensive, long-term management plan and conservation guided by research (for its leaflet Getting to Know Lough Derg, e-mail dergscience@yahoo.ie).

Recession has left speculative Shannon development largely high and dry, though this summer could, indeed, bring even more Irish people to the river and its canals. An economic pause could offer time to let planners and agencies get their ropes untangled and their helms aligned for following the Heritage Council’s big new chart.

Eye on nature

I understand that hedgehogs can climb. Do they climb trees and if so, why?

Hugh Bennett, Ballysimon, Co Limerick

Hedgehogs will climb a tree perhaps for fruit, or just because it’s there.

On April 17th a cricket sang all night in the bushes near my house. I had never before heard crickets in Ireland.

Eoghan O’Loingsigh, Castlegregory, Co Kerry

You heard a grasshopper warbler, a summer visitor that calls with a reeling note for lengthy periods both day and night.

At Carnsore Point, where I like to watch swallows arriving, I have seen them several times coming up the south coast from the west where, instead of turning left up the east coast, they continue out to sea in a south-easterly direction towards Wales or Cornwall.

Michael Lunt, Wexford.

Swallows’ migration route from Africa moves along eastern Spain and western France, and they take off from northern France for these islands. They should arrive, one would think, at southern England first, unless blown off course.

There is a hawthorn at Dunleer which has at present both flower buds and berries.

Gerry Crilly, Dunleer, Co Louth

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.