“This land is your land, this land is my land ... this land was made for you and me.” When Woodie Guthrie penned these words in 1944, he was revising a song he had originally written in 1940 with the title God Blessed America. The updated version became an unlikely anthem, evoking redwood forests, golden valleys and wheat fields waving, but its original intent was defiance.
As American writer Colin Fleming suggested, it is “a paean to the country he loved and a critical broadside launched on behalf of all those – dreamers, migrant workers, poets, or anyone else – who ever felt that their vision of America had been compromised”.
The song entered the national consciousness and “was there to be used by people who had use for it”.
Should the same apply to the land? As summer begins, those in Ireland demanding the right to freely roam the countryside might be tempted to adapt Guthrie’s anthem, such is the depth of feeling that exists about restrictions on their movement, the subject of recent correspondence in this news organisation.
But what constitutes a reasonable right to roam? The Keep Ireland Open campaign has in the past given the example of the UK’s Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 as a way forward: England and Wales have 225,000km of public rights of way, the result of civic defiance and mass trespass in 1932 in Derbyshire that ultimately led to the establishment of national parks.
Some recreational users have done their cause no favours, with their litter, recklessness and uncontrolled dogs
There are no such freedoms in Ireland. The national obsession with land does not extend sufficiently to embracing walkers and ramblers who have no law to champion them; instead, the legal rights rest with landowners. Many of these have accommodated walkers, but too many desired spots are closed off. Our potential richness for walkers is obvious and, in contrast to the Irish situation, access in some other European countries is legally assured. It is also a tourist issue: more than 20 years ago, Bord Fáilte‘s Strategic Plan for Walking (2003-2006) emphasised “access is the most critical issue” for those developing walking tourism “and needs to be solved post haste”.
David Herman, author of various guidebooks about Irish mountains, noted that at the same time, the Irish Farmers’ Association insisted “the property rights of farmers should not be diminished by the conferring of any general rights of access to farmland to the public”. That missed the point that the desire is not usually for access to general farmland but through rough grazing land.
Some recreational users have done their cause no favours, with their litter, recklessness and uncontrolled dogs. There are also occupiers’ liability complications, and the issue of protecting habitats, but surely careful State management of more designated public access areas would help with this?
When advocating greater access in 2003, Herman suggested “landowners will be asked to concede very little; freedom to roam over little more than the 7 per cent most unproductive land in the country plus limited rights of way in the lowlands”. Ten years later, Louise Burns, an expert in regional and urban planning, noted that in England, Wales, Scotland, Denmark, Germany and New Zealand, legislation granted rights to walk private land, and highlighted the Swedish concept of Allemansrätten (everyone’s right to roam): “all of these jurisdictions place a value on the rights of non-landowners to use private land for recreational purposes”, in contrast to the lack of an Irish statutory framework. Yet it must also be acknowledged that the Scandinavian spirit of “respect for the environment and individual responsibility” is not as embedded elsewhere.
Nor is there a cosy consensus about access in the UK. Scottish journalist Patrick Galbraith, author of the recent book Uncommon Ground, scorns owners of out-of-control dogs and right-to-roam trespassers disturbing traps designed to protect some endangered species: “Myopic ecoradicals are playing God.” Regarding access, he insists it is some of the aristocratic estates that are most facilitating and that the right to roam slogan has created caricatures, diverting attention from those most focused on attending nature.
Nonetheless, there is insufficient balance in Ireland between what is dictated by landowners and what is in the public interest when it comes to access. It is a far cry from the situation William Bulfin found himself in when preparing his celebrated book Rambles in Éirinn (1907). On his bicycle tour, he could embrace “long, winding, shallow vales, fine tracts of tilled land, green pastures, too, and shady groves and woods; and all along the eastern and southern horizon stand the blue peaks of the guardian mountains”.
Bulfin was a stalwart of the cultural nationalist movement that emphasised access to what is ours. We do this well in some areas – access to museums and many heritage sites – but not when it comes to accessing our countryside.
