Category: Greenways

Another day, another greenway proposal for something that won’t be useable unless you live within 5km of it and have an appropriate social credit score.

Per the Leitrim Observer, Leitrim County Council have issued a tender for the design and preliminary route selection of a greenway on the former Sligo Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway trackbed.

The article contains a prime example of the inability of the MSM to actually get their facts correct (and they wonder why the MSM is in financial difficulty?). It claims that:

The simplicity of using the closed railway route is that the route is used on license from Irish Rail if it is ever needed for a new railway in the future.

I obviously missed the bit in Irish railway history where the SL&NCR was bought by GSR/CIE, thereby giving them the trackbed. The last time I checked, the SL&NCR, being a cross border railway, was excluded from the merger of all railway companies wholly within the Free State in the 1920s and it continued on as an independent concern until the Government of Northern Ireland closed the connecting line through Enniskillen by fiat, thereby rendering the SL&NCR economically defunct.

Now 1 year into the “new normal” of ‘flatten the curve’, our benevolent overlords are spaffing more money on projects that the majority of the population cannot use as Ireland continues to be an open air prison.

This time, the regime has announced the Royal Canal Greenway from Maynooth, Co. Kildare to Clondara in Co. Longford. Interestingly, as the majority of tax revenue is generated in Dublin, the people of Dublin are paying for this project but will not benefit from it as it is more than 5km away from Dublin.

RTE reports that An Bord Pleanála has approved the plans for the greenway along the bulk of the trackbed of the former Farranfore to Valentia Harbour railway in Kerry and associated compulsory purchase orders.

One wonders what the point of a greenway in a lockdown State is.