Sir, - If walkers and other recreational users think their forbearance in the recent foot-and-mouth crisis is going to make them any more welcome in the countryside, they should think again. In the places where most of the recent clashes between walkers and farmers have occurred - that is, the western seaboard - all the long-standing excluded areas are still unreasonably out of bounds. Meanwhile, the main farm organisation involved, the IFA, has refused to move a square inch.
While only a minority of farmers have a hostile attitude to walkers, these farmers have the right to expel walkers from their land, no matter if land is under rough grazing or how long the area has been open to the public. More and more farmers are exploiting the present legal position, since the law is so much in their favour. This is emphatically not the case in the rest of north-western Europe, where the law is fairly balanced between recreational user and landowner.
We in Keep Ireland Open wrote to the IFA seeking a meeting to discuss access and specific cases of intimidation of walkers, including physical assaults resulting in conviction. All we received was a communication stating that the IFA's role was to defend farmers, seemingly without reference to how extreme some farmers' actions are. Nor does the IFA appear to care how other groups, and in particular the hard-hit tourism industry, for which hill walking is an important sector, might suffer as a result. For the IFA, it appears that public interest applies only when farmers themselves are in trouble. Yours, etc.,
David Herman, Keep Ireland Open, Meadow Grove, Dublin 16.