Sir, - A week or so ago I was leading a group of French tourists on a walking holiday in the northwest. As we approached an area where I had been many times before without causing damage or being challenged, we were accosted by a farmer who was waving a stick and yelling obscenities. Even though we retreated we met this man again and suffered another dose of his foul language and threats, both verbal and physical.
No doubt the tourists, who were understandably shaken by this incident, will recount this story when they return home. The end result will be that a few more tourists will be lost to Ireland, and the stories already spreading about the sad fact that there may be somewhat fewer than "a hundred thousand welcomes" in Ireland will spread wider. I was reminded of this when I read "High Times" in your edition of August 19th, in which Rosita Boland interviewed the mountaineer Joss Lynam. Joss bemoaned the fact that no one wants to know about the increasing difficulties of accessing our countryside. How right he is.
We in Keep Ireland Open have been pestering local authorities, TDs, tourist interests and anyone else who will listen about this problem or ones associated with it, such as the increasing lengths of fencing running across miles of previously open moorland. With a few exceptions it seems that the only rights of way that interest politicians and the authorities are those leading to their local pubs.
Contrast this with Northern Ireland, where the Department of the Environment has just produced a very positive discussion document which would, with the agreement of landowners, allow freedom of access to much of Northern Ireland's open countryside.
We are not, of course, suggesting that more than a small minority of landowners are acting in a way that will harm tourism. The pity of it is that those few who do can cause so much damage and that the authorities are unwilling either to do anything to curb them or even to take an interests in the problem. - Yours, etc.
David Herman, Keep Ireland Open, Butterfield Drive, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.