Access to the countryside

Madam, - The ultimate problem for country people is a fear of the unknown

Madam, - The ultimate problem for country people is a fear of the unknown. A stream of genuine hikers may be followed by a drunken party of teenagers or burglars "casing the joint". The problem of how near, or how far away, any hikers will be from a house or garden can never be known. Most farmers think of their whole farm as a garden, with its use planned from the year before.

Many do not take money from the REPS schemes, in part because they do not want to be told what to do with their land, yet the perception now is that all farmers are paid for doing nothing, and so are obliged to the public for everything that they own and do. I can't recall any publicly-assisted corporation or government body feeling obliged to take the public on their land ad lib, except in a park.

Near Dublin the demand for new places to walk has taken some interesting turns. In the past few years the ad hoc "Liffey Valley Park" proposal has been widely endorsed by local politicians and groups. A report was prepared at public cost, and then ERM (an environmental consultancy) was hired in 2005 at a cost of €100,000 to investigate what the options were. The priority turned out not to be maintaining the whole river valley, but for walkers to be given an extra area of thousands of acres close to Dublin. I happen to know some of the affected landowners, and none had assented to being included in someone else's plan. Most did not know about the plan, nor the need to make their case to ERM. The process invited self-defined "stakeholders" to have their say on equal terms with families who had lived on the riverside for decades, and in one case for centuries - the same families who have made or kept the valley attractive in the first place.

In the event ERM's proposals were based on publicly-owned land. Clearly there is a difference in land value between the Liffey Valley close to Dublin and a boggy hillside in the west, yet the same law must govern each.

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Regarding the Dublin region, and considering only the vast and under-used State-owned lands in north-west Kildare, there is in fact no shortage of public land that the Government can assign to hikers before it has to negotiate with any farmers. - Yours, etc,

PATRICK GUINNESS,

Furness,

Naas,

Co Kildare.

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Madam, - I very much enjoyed reading the very eloquent but contrasting views of Noel Barry, a rambler, and A Byrne, a farmer, on the above issue (July 23rd).

It strikes me that the farmers of this land are so used to doing nothing for something that the concept of giving something for nothing is totally alien to them.

One equitable solution would be an opt-out provision, whereby farmers who opt out of the receipt of EU grants should be granted their privacy. - Yours, etc,

ROY SHERLOCK,

Blessington,

Co Wicklow.