Some weeks ago, the arrival of a boat in Ballynascargy on the Royal Canal was an occasion for celebration.
What was special about the occasion was that the small canal barge was the first craft to enter the village for nearly 35 years and marked a new attitude to our waterways.
The arrival of the barge, which carried a party from Dromad in Co Leitrim, was made possible only by the restoration work on the canal which had been carried out by the Office of Public Works.
The work marked yet another milestone on the plan to make the Royal Canal fully navigable, as is the Grand Canal system, and to open up more of the middle of Ireland to visitors from home and abroad.
There were great celebrations in the village to mark the arrival of the barge, which had taken a full week on the waterways to travel from Dublin.
The last boat to leave the town slipped its moorings in 1965, and since 1976 the Ballynacargy Royal Canal Amenity Group has been trying to get boats back into its harbour. Aware that the government had decided to develop the potential of the canal, the group had started upgrading the facilities there.
It had more or less taken on all the responsibility for the upkeep of the stretch of the canal in the area for the last 20 years and had set up a local Community Employment Scheme to carry out cleaning and upgrading of the canal and its surroundings.
The amenity group also arranged the building of a slip-way at the harbour, to allow local people or others from around the country to put their boats into the canal waters. Now the group is seeking help to provide toilet facilities and showers on the canal, to encourage more visitors to visit the area. It intends to link the toilet system up to a local sewage system.
The group is convinced that the installation of the new lock gates will result in a flood of visitors to the area, as most boating people tend to seek out new locations to visit on their journeys.
The Ballynascargy stop-over will become official when a major boat rally visits the town next month. It is to start out from Dublin on August 8th and will include the village on its list of places to visit.