This is in fact a Bill to authorise C.I.E. to cease using the Royal Canal. The Minister said something on the Report Stage in regard to C.I.E.'s obligation to maintain certain amenities associated with the canal that they have heretofore maintained but there is one aspect of this to which the House should have regard. I believe the canals are a very valuable potential tourist amenity and my apprehension is that at first glance that may seem to many Deputies to be a somewhat fantastic concept. The special amenity to which I refer is the amenity of coarse fishing, which could become a very valuable element in our tourist trade.
There is so much propaganda about tourism that I think people often get fantastic ideas into their heads as to what it is. It is a very valuable invisible export but the bulk of that invisible export does not come from the very wealthy tourist who arrives here to stay at luxury hotels. There is no doubt they make their contribution, but the bulk of tourist income is derived from emigrants returning to visit their families and from the neighbours of these emigrants who are drawn here for the kind of amenities that they value.
I was in some measure personally responsible for the inauguration of the Inland Fisheries Trust and the development of its coarse fishing branch. I have seen developed in my own constituency of Monaghan a type of tourism quite unknown in some parts of the country. It is based almost exclusively on the coarse fishing available in some of the small lakes in Monaghan and that type of tourist is very largely a resident of the English midlands. Such tourists do not seek extravagant or luxurious accommodation but find the kind of accommodation they get in a country town or in a rural village very acceptable. They are prepared to pay quite a liberal rent —five or six guineas a week—for the accommodation they enjoy. It is a valuable source of revenue to remote rural areas and it is a kind of income that such parts of the country can derive from no other source.
To the average person here the idea that people would travel from Birmingham, or Manchester, or the midlands of England, to fish in a canal may seem fantastic. It is literally true, however, that in the canals in that area, including, I think, the Manchester Ship Canal, a very large number of coarse fishing clubs exist; and it is fantastic, but nonetheless true, that so numerous is the membership of these clubs in these areas that there is a widespread agreement amongst them that they do not bring any fish home at all. If they catch a perch, a bream, a roach, or a dace in one of these canals they always put it back and it is, indeed, not untrue to say that they have familiar friends swimming about in the canal, friends whom they catch regularly, two or three times a month and put back again into the canal.
Where you have enthusiasts of this kind who have, as they have in Great Britain, an annual holiday and you offer to them the prospect of fishing in the very much more agreeable atmosphere of our Royal Canal system as compared with the urban canal system that they habituate during the rest of the year, and add to that prospect that nobody gives a fiddle-de-dee whether they bring the fish home, fry them, and eat them in the evening, or put them back into the canal, then you are offering those people a tourist attraction of very real and dramatic value to them and you will draw them into areas where the relatively modest outlay they are prepared to undertake during their holiday period will be of great value. They will be very glad of accommodation in a country house. They will be very happy, indeed, in the accommodation available in the local public house or over the local shop where the owner may care to set a room and cater for a neighbourly kind of people such as I describe during the summer months.
All of us have seen the tendency for abandoned canals to degenerate into the kind of public scandal that the old canal in the vicinity of the town of Monaghan has now become. I am sure that when the responsible authority got permission to suspend traffic on the old Ulster Canal all sorts of assurances were given that the most solemn obligations would be undertaken by the Ulster Canal Company to maintain that amenity. Then, as the years rolled by, the canal reached the stage at which the Ulster Canal Company became incapable of maintaining the canal and we discovered, when they were found incapable, that it was nobody's duty to maintain the canal. Ever since I have been a Deputy representing Monaghan I have been trying to get the Board of Works, or some body, to do something about the old horror of the abandoned Ulster Canal. It represents the extreme limit of abuse that can result from a statutory authority suspending traffic on a canal. I want to prevent, in relation to the Royal Canal and the Grand Canal with which we are dealing now, a much lesser abuse.
I understand from the Minister there is no thought of authorising Córas Iompair Éireann to abandon the Royal Canal. I ask him to go further than that. I want to see the towpath maintained. I want to see the canal prevented from silting up. I want to see the canal preserved in such condition that it can be made a fishing amenity to be integrated into the general tourist programme. I want the Minister to bear in mind that the Inland Fishery Trust is prepared to stock the canal so long as the canal is kept in a condition which will make it physically possible to maintain a stock of fish in it.
I press for some express undertaking by the Minister on this occasion because bitter experience has taught me that once you begin the slow progress which so frequently culminates in the abandonment of a canal you are on a slippery slope and, by the time people wake up to the distance they have travelled, it is often impossible to reverse the trend. I should like, on the Fifth Stage of this Bill, a specific undertaking from the Minister that he intends to insist that, even if this company are authorised by statute to suspend their navigation operations on the canal, there will remain on them the clear and unequivocal obligation to maintain the canal, at least to the extent indicated by me, as a tourist fishing amenity which will operate to draw tourists to the country for the coarse fishing facilities which it offered in the past and which it should be maintained to offer in the future.
