I took last week off work and spent most of it walking through the Wicklow mountains from Glenmalure to Rathfarnham. There were seven of us: two adults and five children, aged between 10 and 13, writes Fintan O'Toole
We experienced the glorious gorse and the soaring sparrow hawks, the sunshine sufficiently intense to make the icy water of the Dargle a balm for boiling feet.
We also suffered the long trudge through a weirdly post-apocalyptic landscape, scorched by fires that were still smouldering even though the wind-driven rain was finding every crack in our supposedly waterproof plastic armour. And that, too, was, at least in retrospect, part of the pleasure.
Readers who have waded through too many What I Did on My Holidays school compositions may be wondering what all of this has to do with the public policy issues to which a column like this is supposed to be devoted.
Rather a lot, in fact. A fair amount of public money, for example, has been spent to encourage a population which has some of the highest rates of heart disease in the developed world to get into the habit of walking. The alarming increase in childhood obesity revealed by the recent Department of Health surveys carries a huge cost, not just in personal misery but in hard cash.
Our little trip was also good for the crisis-ridden rural economy. We stayed in local B&Bs. We bought food in local shops. We ate our evening meals in village pubs. (Most parents can imagine what an enormous boost to consumption is represented by a 13-year-old boy who has just walked 20 kilometres in the open air.) We paid local taxi-drivers to get us back on to the route in the morning.
And the kids were learning things that the State spends a lot of money to teach in schools. Their awareness of the environment has been enhanced.
So has their connection as typical city kids to the increasingly distant world of agriculture and rural life. Many people in the farming community clearly see the increased interest in hill walking as a great opportunity to create a future in agriculture beyond the inevitable decline of the EU subsidy culture.
We stayed, for example, at the Wicklow Way Lodge, at Oldbridge, about three miles from Roundwood. It is part of a typical Irish sheep farm, owned and run by a farming family. It has all the traditional virtues of warmth and helpfulness. But it's also a very impressive business investment, with beautifully appointed rooms, en-suite bathrooms, colour televisions, hairdryers, underfloor heating and pretty much everything you would expect in a good hotel.
It represents a very considerable act of faith in the possibility of combining farming and tourism in a way that will develop a sustainable rural economy. Yet, in this perverse country, all of this is becoming impossible. Just beside Oldbridge, for example, is Lough Dan, a beautiful place enjoyed by generations of walkers. As far as I could see, every single public access route to Lough Dan has now been cut off either physically with barbed wire fences or legally with no-trespassing signs and dire warnings of prosecution.
And this is not at all untypical. It has long been the case that people walking on long-established green roads have run the risk of being confronted by a cantankerous farmer with a dog and, in extreme cases, a shotgun. But the situation has got far worse. The foot-and-mouth crisis, during which many paths were quite reasonably blocked as a short-term emergency measure, has been treated as an opportunity to erect permanent barriers. And now the IFA is actively encouraging its members in many areas to block public access.
This is sheer lunacy. Sixty per cent of tourists coming to Ireland now cite walking as one of the main reasons for their visit. Local authorities have put a lot of effort into developing and advertising walking routes like the Burren Way and the Kerry Way. Yet both of these routes and many others have become virtually impassable.
As a result, companies that organise walking holidays are switching their business to Britain, where, for example, the authorities have spent a fortune opening a route along the entire length of Hadrian's Wall.
The IFA, in essence, wants its members to be paid a subsidy by the EU for allowing access. This will never happen, for the simple reason that access elsewhere in Europe is seen as a right, and it would be simply stupid for Brussels to set an expensive precedent in Ireland.
There are obvious ways to deal with the problem, like paying farmers to maintain paths and stiles that cross their land. But as ever no one wants to take responsibility for an absurdity that hurts the rural community much more than it hurts the urban types like me who can, after all, always decide to take our holidays elsewhere.
It's always easier to blame the predictable decline in the tourist figures on the war in Iraq or the SARS outbreak than to actually sort out a problem that is within our control.