The scenic way to Shannon

Irish Times, Saturday 9 February 2013

LENNY ANTONELLI walks the Royal Canal on the Meath-Kildare border

The Royal Canal was raised in the shadow of its big brother. In the 1750s the idea of a waterway linking Dublin to the north Shannon was rejected, and instead the more southerly Grand Canal was built.

In the 1780s a director of the Grand Canal Company quit to build a rival waterway. But the route of the Royal Canal wasn’t precisely planned, the project amassed huge debts, and the founding company was ultimately dissolved. The Royal Canal finally met the Shannon in 1817, costing far more than its rival. It never saw as much traffic either.

I followed the towpath east from Blackshade Bridge, Co Meath on a cold January afternoon, the sky coated with cloud too thin to dull the clear winter light. The canal was frozen shut in parts, while in places it seemed ice-free until I got close enough to see a film of cellophane-thin ice.

I day-dreamed of skating down the canal rather than walking beside it.

The canal bridged the Boyne on a limestone aqueduct, then passed under the Ribbontail footbridge, built to bring Massgoers to the church in Longwood. It may have been named after the Ribbonmen, a secret agrarian society that fought for farm workers’ rights.

In his book Irish Popular Superstitions, William Wilde described the departing journey of Longford emigrants on Royal Canal packet-boats.

“Their friends followed for a considerable distance, many, brimful of whisky as well as grief, crowding upon the bridges, and sometimes pulling the boat to the brink by the tow-rope, for the purpose of sending a message to one of their transatlantic friends,” he wrote. “All gradually fell back, except one very old woman, who, with her grey elf-locks streaming in the wind . . . ran after the vessel which contained her only son.” The canal welds human and natural engineering together. It’s layered with wildlife habitats but never too wild. Instead human design makes it seem sedate: the flat level, the straight channel, all those right angles.

The drone from the nearby M4 was constant, but it just made the canal seem more secret.

The Dublin-Sligo railway line follows the canal too.The Midland Great Western Railway Company bought the whole waterway in 1845 to build a track on the land beside it. But the arrival of trains to Ireland undercut the canal boats – even the light “fly boats” took eight hours to ferry passengers from Dublin to Mullingar.

CIÉ closed the Royal Canal in 1961. The western end dried up, locks decayed, and there were even plans to build a motorway on the Dublin city section. But campaigners fought to save to it, and in 2010 the full canal reopened. The towpath is now a long-distance walking trail, the Royal Canal Way, running from Dublin to the Shannon.

I passed Furey’s pub at Moyvalley and walked into Enfield in declining light. But you don’t have to follow my route to the letter: the train stops plenty between Dublin and Enfield, making day-walks between stations easy.

ROYAL CANAL WAY, BLACKSHADE BRIDGE TO ENFIELD

Trail Start at Blackshade Bridge, Co Meath, near M4. Finish at Enfield. At Moyvalley the trail crosses a busy road, and some steep road bridges are hard to see over. Seewaterwaysireland.orgfor canal sections. Three hours, 12.5km

Map irishtrails.ie. OSI Disc Series sheet 49.

Wildest Dublin

Irish Times, 5 January, 2013 Lenny Antonelli walks the Dublin Mountains Way, one of Ireland's newest long-distance trails

I went to Dublin seeking wild landscapes, not really expecting to find any. Living on the west coast I usually don’t travel far for this sort of thing. Going to Dublin to find mountains felt incongruous. Zig-zagging over the hills from Tallaght to Shankill, the Dublin Mountains Way is two years old. I started from the trailhead at Seán Walsh Park, Tallaght, aiming to make Glencullen by sunset. The trail skirted housing estates, then dropped me into comparative wilderness around the Bohernabreena reservoir, where the river Dodder was damned in the 1880s and wooded hills fall to the lakeshore.

This valley is also home to orchid-rich grassland and petrifying springs, where lime-rich water rises from the ground and deposits calcium carbonate in a white, crunchy coating.

The trail brought me into the hills, looking over to lime and rust-coloured slopes on Seahan and Corrig mountains. Walkers need to be cautious as this section is on narrow, windy roads.

I expected Celtic Tiger mansions up here and there were some. But it was mostly old stone cottages, hay sheds, farm yards and signs warning that dogs worrying sheep would be shot.

This valley – Gleann na Smól, glen of the thrushes – was one of the last places in which the Irish language survived near Dublin.

Heavy mist pressed down on the hills as I climbed. And though I couldn’t see them, I was surrounded by mountains.

The trail entered the Featherbed forest, but the name felt euphemistic as it crossed felled planation. I felt like a lone survivor in the aftermath of some brutal apocalypse, surveying a landscape of decaying tree stumps, black pools, churned peat and a few limbless trees. It reminded me of the writer Tim Robinson’s description of clear-felled forest in Connemara as “frozen at a moment of maximum horror”.

But soon I entered the forest at Cruagh, passing a mossy stone bearing an inscription to the naturalist HC Hart, who in 1886 bet a colleague that he could walk the 111km from Terenure to the summit of Lugnaquilla in Wicklow and back within 24 hours.

He won, returning to Terenure with 10 minutes to spare. The trail followed rows of mature spruce trees, heather, mosses, and flowering gorse.

I went up Tibradden Mountain and towards the summit of Two Rock, the way’s highest point. Writer and nationalist Stephen Gwynn described this area as “bare and lonely, as devoid of any suggestion of a great city’s nearness as even Connemara could show”. This is what I had come looking for, but I could only see a few metres of the trail rising into the clouds ahead of me.

Soon a gust of wind blew off the clouds to reveal Fairy Castle, Two Rock’s summit tomb, and the orange glow of the city below.

The trail brought me towards the huge transmitters at Three Rock. Writing in 1780, the artist Gabriel Beranger reckoned the mountain’s distinctive rock clusters were altars built to offer sacrifices. They are, in fact, natural granite formations.

But I was in trouble: the walk had taken longer than planned and the sky was blackening, so I donned a headlamp and high-vis jacket to descend Ticknock forest in the dark. The final stretch into Glencullen on country roads in the dark was the most treacherous bit of my walk – without a headlamp I’d have been in serious trouble.

The lesson? Walking from Tallaght to Glencullen is probably too much at this time of year – if you want to walk this route in winter, tackle it over multiple days, or just pick a sub-section.

Dublin Mountains Way

Map : Get trail maps from dublinmountains.ie(the DMW route can change). OSI Discovery Series Map 50 covers the area but shows an old DMW route. East West Mapping also publishes Dublin Mountains map.

Start : DMW trailhead in Seán Walsh Park off Kiltipper Road, a short walk from the Tallaght Luas stop. Or start anywhere along the route.

Finish : Johnny Foxes pub, Glencullen.

Time and distance : Tallaght to Glencullen is 20 miles with lots of ascending. Seven to 10 hours.

Route : Walking Tallaght-Glencullen in daylight during winter is a big challenge. Suitability: Bring food, water, rain gear and warm clothes, hiking boots, map, compass, high vis clothing and a torch/head lamp.

Take a walk on the Grand side

Irish Times, 15 December 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI walks a quiet section of the Grand Canal in Kildare

The Grand Canal Way is a rarity in Ireland: a long-distance walk that’s almost entirely off-road, stretching from Adamstown in west Dublin to Shannon Harbour, Co Offaly.

The section between Hazelhatch and Sallins is a perfect microcosm of it – a half day’s walk between two towns serviced by a railway whose own history is entangled in that of the canal.

I set out from Hazelhatch, where houseboats line the channel. This must be Dublin’s most chaotic and inspiriting row of homes: the barges are cream, red and highlighter blue, fat and slim, tall and squat. The towpath is decorated with bicycles, tables, old kayaks, wheelie bins, solar panels and wooden sculptures. Smoke rises from their chimneys, but nobody emerges from below deck, so I walk on.

Work began on the Grand Canal in 1756 in Clondalkin. But progress was slow, and it took more than two decades before the 20km channel to Sallins was open. Further west, the immense Bog of Allen almost sunk the project when clay walls built to support it failed. The Grand Canal finally reached the Shannon in 1803, but the age of fast rail travel was looming.

For those who normally walk the mountains or coast, the canal is an entirely different creature. While hillwalking is adventurous, canal-walking is ponderous – you needn’t worry about navigation or the terrain here, the towpath just carries you endlessly forwards. But our canals play a crucial ecological role, linking up rivers and lakes that would otherwise be isolated. And their landscape makes you pay attention for its subtler rewards, like a moorhen hiding in the sedges, or bubbles breaking on the water’s surface, perhaps released by a tench eating grubs on the floor of the canal.

Like a forgotten thoroughfare it sneaks behind fields and country estates. It’s hidden from Kildare’s modern commuter towns, and has an architecture all of its own. I passed steep stone bridges, derelict lock-keeper’s cottages, and an old canal-side church and school at Ardclough. I walked by the old Lyons demesne, with its immense Georgian manor, and Oughterard, where Arthur Guinness is buried and Daniel O’Connell killed John D’Esterre in a pistol duel in 1815. Bring a map though: often these features are behind high walls or rows of ivy-wrapped trees.

About half way to Sallins, the light started to disintegrate. Colour drained from the landscape, leaving only the black trees and the shadows they cast on the inky water. Walking in the half-light was thrilling, though, and dead silent except when my presence sent terrified birds screaming from the trees.

Soon I passed under the railway bridge just before Sallins. The Grand Canal Company fought the building of the railways, and this bridge proved pivotal: once the Great Southern and Western Railway Company won the right to bridge the canal in the 1840s, the rail network could stretch out to Cork, Limerick and Galway. Just two decades later, the mass transport of people and goods on the canal was finished.

WALKS THE GRAND CANAL WAY

Map : OSI, Discovery Series, Sheets 49 and 50. Downloadable maps of the Grand Canal Way at irishtrails.ie(see also for train times).

Start : Hazlehatch Bridge, 600m from Hazelhatch and Celbridge rail station.

Finish : Trail ends at Sallins.

Time and distance : 12.6km. Takes four hours if you want to explore slowly.

Suitability : Easy. Bring food, water and warm, waterproof clothes and footwear.

Rail services: On the Dublin-Kildare line, with trains leaving Heuston station frequently.

The waters and the wild

Irish Times, 24 November 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI encounters a trout river and deceiving mushrooms

The terrain between the northern end of Lough Corrib and the mountains of Connemara is tough to categorise. It’s a place where flat lakeland meets quartzite peaks, yet it doesn’t belong to either. The region’s folding plateaus are softer and greener than the neighbouring mountains, yet more complex and cryptic, and less walked. The stretch of the Western Way between Curraun Beg and Maam Cross offers an easy introduction to this zone of transition. Right at the end of a cul de sac winding 13km from Oughterard, the trailhead is a remote spot with few houses and a patchwork of field and forest that includes modern plantation and scraps of old woodland. The electricity network didn’t stretch here until 1975. The car park looks across a narrow neck of the lake towards the sessile oak woodland on the Hill of Doon.

The trail goes west along the boreen under Curraun Hill, past the ruins of a 19th century national school, and into a mossy conifer plantation. Hop over the stile at the end of the forest and on to the open bog.

Heading towards Lackavrea mountain, the trail crosses a footbridge and enters a vast conifer plantation near a townland known as Doirín na gCos Fuar – the small wood of the cold feet. According to cartographer Tim Robinson, local folklore says a herdsman was killed by a bull here, and all that was found of him was his feet. But Robinson says the term “cosa fuara” also referred to poor people, or newcomers to an area, so the name could have a more prosaic explanation.

The trail follows the Falamer river, where brown trout spawn in autumn and winter. The females excavate nests in the gravel bed of the river, then lays eggs that are immediately fertilised by the male. The female covers the nest, known as a redd, and the fish that hatch in spring will spend a year or so here before migrating downstream to Lough Corrib.

After the trail leaves the river, the rest of the walk to the Maam valley is a fairly dull slog through the plantation, so you could turn back now. But I decided to persevere, and the abundance of mushrooms growing beside the boardwalk was enough to hold my interest, their names as curious as their shapes and textures: the deceiver, the sulphur tuft, the sickener.

Lackavrea mountain appears through gaps in the forest. This is a rough and complex mountain, as indicated by its Irish name Leic Aimhreidh, the rugged rock-slab. The trail eventually leaves the forest over a footbridge, crosses the bog and emerges onto the road under the Maamturk mountains.

Oscar Wilde’s father William wrote about a similar journey, from the lakeland into the mountains, in his book Lough Corrib: Its shores and islands, but by boat instead of on foot.

“Steering through the narrow intricate passage under the wooded promontory of Doon, we literally leave Lough Corrib and the scenery of Mayo behind us, and pass into another region, grander, wilder and more romantic,” he wrote.

WALKS LACKAVREA FOREST, CO GALWAY

Map : Ordnance Survey Ireland, Discovery Series, Sheet 45

Start: Car park at Hill of Doon viewpoint

Finish : The trail emerges onto the R336 between Maam Cross and Maam village.

Time and distance: The full linear walk is about 9km and takes about three hours.

Suitability: Easy to moderate. Map, waterproof boots, warm clothes, rain gear, food and water essential.

Dizzying Donegal

Irish Times, 27 October 2012

GO WALK: LENNY ANTONELLI explores the seascapes of Gleann Cholm Cille

DRIVING IN FROM the bog above, Gleann Cholm Cille appears like a Greenlandic outpost, a scatter of low buildings enclosed by sea and mountain. A web of bog tracks takes you into the hills north of the village – a branch from one leads to an early 19th-century lookout tower, on the 220m cliffs at Glen Head.

Local teacher Thomas McGinley found this height too great to comprehend the sea below. “Both vision and hearing fail . . . at this awful altitude,” he wrote.  McGinley walked this coast in the 19th century, documenting its wildlife and history. The Derry Journal published his notes weekly under the pen-name Kinnfaela, and later collected them in a book The Cliff Scenery of South Western Donegal.

I abandon the trail at the tower and follow the coast. Soon the cliffs indent sharply and the ground drops steeply to a small valley – move inland to cross the valley safely and rejoin the cliffs on the other side.

Up ahead the coast cuts out to sea at a right angle – this is the Sturrall, a vertical headland where locals once picked edible rock samphire, McGinley wrote. Some even descended the cliff to gather seaweed on the shore far below.

His book tells the story of a rector’s son who planned to swipe eggs from an eagle’s nest on the Sturrall. Locals warned against it, but this hardened the lad’s ambition, and he raved about the idea in his sleep. One night he sleepwalked up to the cliffs and strode out the Sturrall through wind and rain. The next morning he told his mother he had dreamt of robbing the nest, and she promptly handed him the eggs he’d brought back in the night.

Following the cliffs, the terrain shifts from dry heather to muddy bog to a forest of dead ferns. Two choughs let out laser-like calls above me – these red-billed crows live along our western coasts, but their numbers are declining.

Soon a track leads down to the shore at Port, a ruined settlement that was home to a few shepherds during the 19th century. Nearby in 1870 a storm sunk the Sydney, a cargo ship taking timber from Quebec to Scotland. Four of the 19 dead are buried at Port.

I climb up Port Hill along the cliffs for a view of Tormore, Ireland’s highest sea stack. Local folklorist Seán O’Heochaidh told a story of the stack: Jack Mór climbed it to hunt seabirds during the famine. He met another man on the same mission, and both filled their bags with birds. But Jack Mór weakened on his way down and couldn’t carry on. The other man went for help, but a great storm blew in. Jack Mór was stranded for a fortnight. When his rescuers arrived, there was nothing left of Jack but his bones. It was said these could still be seen on the side of Tormore 70 years later.

Daylight was against me and it was time to head back down to Port, where the bog track offers a different return route to Gleann Cholm Cille. Since setting out, the valleys had grown progressively more remote: first Gleann Cholm Cille itself, then the backwater of Port, and now ahead of me was Glenlough, with ruined cottages that no road reaches.

The American painter, Rockwell Kent, stayed at Glenlough in 1926 while painting this coast. The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, spent a summer there too, trying to wean himself off alcohol by walking and writing. But the black nights and isolation got to him, and in letters to a friend he recalled encounters with Count Antigarlic, “a strange Hungarian gentleman . . . coming down the hill in a cloak lined with spiders”. The local poitín may have gone to his head.

Gleann Cholm Cille

Map: Ordnance Survey Ireland, Discovery Series, Sheet 10.

Start finish: We parked in the townland of Beefan, just north of the village, joining the bog track around grid reference G 524 858.

Route: My walk followed sections of various official trails, starting on the Tower Loop. The bog track from Port back to Glencolmcille is part of the long distance Slí Cholmcille, and also joins the local Drum Loop. Seeirishtrails.iefor details.

There is a map board of local loops at the walking centre in the village. Do not attempt a shortcut back to the start point by going off trail across Beefan and Garveross Mountain – its south face is extremely steep.

Suitability: Inexperienced walkers should keep to the marked trails and avoid open mountain and cliff. Utmost care and attention required. Stay inside the intermittent fence. Map, warm clothes, good boots, rain gear, packed lunch, food and water needed. Compass and navigation skills required if heading off trail.

Time: Six to seven hours for my route, or four for both local loops.

Distance: My route was about 19km. Combing both local loops is 13km.

Services: Shop, food and accommodation in Glencolmcille.

The Blasket Islands

Irish Times, 29 September 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI walks Great Blasket and its lesser-known smaller cousins

OF ALL IRISH islands, Inishnabro offers its rare visitor the grandest entrance. We climb from our ferry into a dinghy and search for a landing spot among the steep rock. Suddenly a sea arch appears, and our boatman steers through it to a hidden cove. We hop out onto the wet rock and up a steep gully to the grassy slopes above.

Inishnabro is one of the Blasket Islands, those last half-drowned scraps of Ireland before the open Atlantic. Much has been written about Great Blasket, home to authors Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, which was evacuated in 1953. But little is said of neighbouring islands such as Inishnabro and Inishtooskert.

Without animals to graze it, Inishnabro’s flora seems primeval, a kaleidoscope of colour and texture unseen elsewhere. Its upper slopes are thick with purple heather, spongy sea pink and yellow goldenrod. We hike to the 175m summit, on the north face where the land drops into the sea in a kilometre-long stretch of grassy cliffs.

In 1973, private space flight pioneer Gary Hudson proposed building a spacecraft launchpad here, and said the idea was backed by an astronaut “who walked on the moon”. But according to a memo, a Department of Foreign Affairs official feared the idea could be a “gigantic leg pull”.

But we can’t linger here – we must get to the next island before sea conditions get worse. At Inishtooskert we land on the steep, rocky shore. The odd sight of strangers sends sheep, which are grazing above us, scurrying up a precipitous ridge.

In his book The Blaskets: A Kerry Island Library, Muiris Mac Conghail describes how sheep were taken off Inishtooskert. The men would “pull and and jump with the sheep down the cliff edge, almost becoming in the act sheep themselves”, then embark on the “long row home with a heavy boat with up to 15 sheep tied together”.

We hike up to the island’s highest point, a 172m north-facing cliff, then down to an early Christian oratory and beehive hut, on the south slopes, whose past is grizzly. Tomás and Peig O Catháin were living here around 1850 when a storm cut the island off for six weeks. Tomás died and his body putrified, but his wife was too weak to remove the corpse. There was no other shelter on the island, so she dismembered the body and removed the pieces.

When neighbours from Great Blasket could finally visit, the “woman was alone, nearly dead from hunger, and a maniac”, wrote archaeologist George Du Noyer.

Our boat drops us at Great Blasket next, near the sands of An Trá Bán. The island is essentially a long mountain ridge, and green roads let you explore its wild spine.

Great Blasket’s summit lies near its remote western tip, out of sight of any civilisation, modern or extinct.

From here you have a clear view to the sheer pyramid of Tearaght, the most westerly Blasket and Ireland’s most westerly island, with a lighthouse that clings for dear life to the cliff face.

Tearaght “appears as an astonishing distant rock”, wrote Joan and Ray Stagles in The Blasket Islands: Next Parish America. “More fantasy than reality, far out in the Atlantic, a final punctuation mark to Europe.”

Blaskets

Map : Ordnance Survey Discovery Series 70.

Getting there: Various boat operators including blasketislands.ie, dinglebaycharters.ie

Routes: Inishnabro and Inishtooskert are small so finding the highest point is straightforward. To get to the Great Blasket summit follow the green roads from the village west to Slievedonagh and walk the island’s ridge.

Distance and time: About 12km on the three islands: roughly four hours on the islands and six at sea. Suitability: Our boatman insisted he would only land experienced walkers here.

Photo available from Wikimedia Commons and may be reused according to terms of GNU Free Documentation License

Middle ground

Irish Times, 25 August, 2012

There’s an allure on this Aran island that is hard to grasp, writes LENNY ANTONELLI

DAY TRIPPERS HEAD FOR Inis Mór. Those seeking the road less travelled usually go to Inis Oirr. Few go to Inis Meáin. The island seems happy to keep it that way. The island is, of course, a Gaeltacht island. The academic AJ Hughes wrote that Inis Meáin was one of the only places he “found people who could not speak English” during his travels through the Gaeltacht in the 1990s.

After I got off the ferry, a car with a trailer full of passengers pulled up. “Want a lift?” the driver asked. I had to decline – I was here to walk.

Leaving the pier I went west above the beach, then turned on to a boreen through the labyrinth of stone walls and up to the main settlement. Dozens of five-spot burnet moths, with red spots on black wings, flew around. I headed west on the island’s main road, past JM Synge’s old cottage retreat – open to visitors during the summer – and Dún Chonchúir, a huge hillfort that I had all to myself.

It’s wise to pick up cartographer Tim Robinson’s meticulously drawn map of the islands before you go – it names every cliff, inlet and headland cut from the coast of dark limestone.

The main road climbs and ends where a path through the fields leads to Synge’s Chair, a stone shelter the writer frequented above the cliffs. I turned south here, walking between the patchwork of fields and a huge embankment of shattered limestone that had been cleared from the land.

I climbed over the rocks to find a wide pavement above the black cliffs. Here, on the island’s most desolate corner, you can engage in what Synge called “the wild pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows”.

Follow the coast south, but watch out: the rock can be slippery, and the cliffs overhang.

The cliffs turn to shoreline after you turn the island’s southwest corner, heading towards the windfarm that powers the island’s desalination plant. The poet Dara Beag Ó Flatharta sees the turbines as enhancing the island’s beauty, like “‘feathers in the hats of ladies at the Galway races”.

Herring gulls patrolled the coast, and the limestone was littered with their handiwork: crushed purple urchins and huge discarded crab legs. I followed a faint trail near the stone walls to avoid the wet rock. No sunshine pierced the clouds, and on days like this in limestone country, the sea, rock and sky bounce greyness off each other.

But there is plenty of colour. Past the windfarm, I turned at a walking marker on to Bóthar na gCreag, a grassy boreen surrounded by green fields splashed with the red, purple, yellow and blue of the wildflowers. I followed the track through a complex of stone walls – some taller than me – and up to the island’s other fort, Dún Fearbhai, just above the main settlement. Then it was time to head back for the ferry.

The allure of Inis Meáin can be difficult to grasp. It is, essentially, a flat grey rock. But when you leave you find yourself being drawn back to the place, almost subconsciously.

Synge found a “tawdry medley of all that is crudest in modern life” back in urban Galway after he left the island. “I have come out . . . to stroll along the edge of Galway Bay and look out in the direction of the islands,” he wrote. “The sort of yearning I feel towards those lonely rocks is indescribably acute.”

Inis Meáin

Start and finish : The pier, Inis Meáin

Distance : About 13km

Time : Four to five hours – maybe too long for a day trip, but you could get a taxi between the pier and the main settlement, and back again.

Suitability : Moderate. Avoid cliffs and remote coast in rough weather. The limestone pavement can be tough underfoot; proceed carefully near the cliffs. Bring a good map, boots, rain gear and plenty of food and water.

Map : Oileáin Arann map, produced by Tim Robinson (Folding Landscapes); OS Ireland, Discovery series, sheet 51.

Route : This is a shorter version of one in Paddy Dillon’s book Irish Coastal Walks. There are also waymarked walks that follow the boreens through the island’s interior.

Food and services : There is a shop, pub, restaurant, cafe and accommodation, but many services are seasonal.

Turkish delight

Irish Times, 21 July, 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI takes a ramble around one of the west’s wildest islands

SHEER ISOLATION SETS Inishturk apart; 14 kilometers by ferry, it’s one of our most remote outposts. Just 53 people live on the island all year round. You’ll find no sweater stores, pony-and-trap tours or interpretive centres.

The island’s western side is an expanse of rocky grassland and cliff-top that can only be explored on foot. Two looped trails leave the harbour, with it’s blue-green waters and cluster of cottages. We followed the signposts up the hill and through a gate, then went up the slope to the right for a quick lookout – sheer cliffs dropped 80 metres to the sea below us. Bring binoculars: the island’s cliffs are home to peregrine falcons, puffins, fulmars and chough.

We followed the purple trail west past lonely Lough Coolaknick (the green trail heads south here), then left it to hike to the old signal tower on the hill above – one of dozens built by the British to warn of any invasion from Napoleon’s armies in the early 19th century. At 191 metres it’s the island’s highest point, with a wide panorama of the mountains and islands of west Mayo and Connemara.

Inishturk has been inhabited on and off since 4,000 BC. After the famine, the island’s landlord, Lord Lucan, sent a gunboat with armed bailiffs to evict the islanders and knock their houses when they couldn’t pay rents. But Mayo MP Ousley Higgins fought for the islanders, and they gradually returned to rebuild their homes.

Descend back to the purple trail – marked by stone slabs across open grassland – and follow it west to a viewing point, where Atlantic waves batter huge cliffs and sharp sea stacks. The sun shone on our backs here as dozens of fulmars circled above the void, almost within touching distance.

Rather than take the purple trail inland we followed the wild cliffs heading southwest.This is the tricky part: the bumpy landscape makes it difficult to see the edge, which cuts in and out sharply. One minute I thought I was safely inland, the next I was right on the precipice.

The rough tracks here run perilously close to the overhanging edge – ignore them and follow the coast from further inland. There are steep sections there too, so be ready for a little scrambling.

We walked out to Dromore Head, then followed a stream inland past marshy Lough Namucka to a stone wall, which we followed left up a hillside. Marshy terrain must be negotiated in places here, but the ground offers a medley of wildflowers. Stay with the wall as it rejoins both marked trails and arrives at the island’s GAA pitch – cut deep into the rocky hillside – then follow the only boreen southwards.

A mining firm found gold on Inishturk in 1990, but the islanders chose not to disturb their quiet home. The Irish Times reported that the company’s geologists were “politely told not to come back to the island again”.

We took a short detour off-trail to Portdoon, a clear lagoon accessed by a steep channel through cliffs to the sea. Folklore says that Danish pirates hid their galleys here, waiting to ambush unsuspecting boats. The pirates were said to be the last people in Ireland who knew the secret of brewing a legendary beer made from heather.

Heading back towards the harbour on the trail, we stopped in the community club for tea. It was sunny enough for one last stop before the harbour: sandy Corraun beach for a quick swim. Then it was back to the ferry for the bumpy hour-long journey home, just ourselves and a couple of islanders sailing under the evening sun towards rainy mainland mountains.

Inishturk, Co Mayo

Map: OSI. Discovery Series. Sheet 37.

Getting there: O’Grady Ferries operates between Inishturk and Roonagh Pier in west Mayo every morning and evening. See clareislandferry.comfor timetables. From Westport take the R335 west to Louisburgh, go through the village and after about a quarter mile take a right turn signposted for Roonagh.

Start and finish: The harbour, Inishturk.

Distance: About 11km.

Time: A leisurely four to five hours

Suitability: Moderate.

Food and services: There is a shop, pub and post office, B&Bs that serve dinner, and self-catering options.

Further information: inishturkisland.com. Information on the marked trails at mayotrails.ie.

Priory Hall is not an exception

Published in Village magazine, May 2012 Priory Hall is no exception — a history of poor regulation and enforcement has left many of us living in shoddy homes, argues Lenny Antonelli

The government has launched a public consultation on building control following the high profile evacuation of the Priory Hall development in north Dublin due to fire safety defects.

But the proposed changes are nothing more than a paper exercise that will do little to boost the number of on site building inspections.

The new rules demand the submission of "certificates of compliance" confirming a project meets the legal requirements of the building regulations. Drawings showing how a building complies will also have to be lodged. But it speaks volumes that such basic measures aren't already in place.

Following Priory Hall, environment minister Phil Hogan said the fact Dublin City Council took the case to court "is a clear indication the Building Control Act is robust" (1). But if the act was robust, 240 people wouldn't have moved into a faulty building. And the government wouldn't be fixing the act six months later.

Priory Hall highlighted the lack of on-site building inspection in Ireland. The government requires local authorities to inspect just 12-15% of buildings. In 2010 — the last year for which figures are available — the average local authority inspected just a quarter of buildings. Four local authorities failed to meet their target, and two —Wexford County and Waterford City Councils — inspected no buildings at all.(2)

But the Irish Home Builders Association — a division of the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) — defended Irish builders in the wake of Priory Hall, and said the system of self-certifying buildings had worked well.

"Priory Hall is an exceptional case," director Hubert Fitzpatrick told Construction, the CIF magazine last October. But is it really? (3)

None of the houses examined for a study of 52 homes built between 1997 and 2002 complied fully with building regulations. The study was commissioned by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland but never published. Green building magazine Construct Ireland, which I'm deputy editor of, obtained it last year.

The study examined the homes for compliance with regulations on energy efficiency, ventilation and "heat producing appliances". Just one complied with energy efficiency rules in full, almost half failed to meet the rules for heat producing appliances, and over 40% failed to minimum ventilation standards. (5)

In a 2005 study, the National Disability Authority found housing had a "poor level of compliance" with Part M of the building regulations, which deals with access for people with disability.

These are the only two known studies that have looked at whether Irish housing complies with any parts of building regulations, according to the Department of Environment.

Other stories undermine the idea the Priory Hall is an exception. Up to 20,000 homes may now be infected with pyrite, a mineral that can cause some construction materials to expand and crack if exposed to air and water (7). Socialist TD Joe Higgins described these homes as "exploding in slow motion".

Meanwhile in Balgaddy, West Dublin, up to 400 local authority houses built at the height of the boom are plagued by dampness, mold, cracking, leaks, and electrical and sewage faults. (8)

And earlier this year, it was reported that up to 300 homes and apartments at Balmayne, north Dublin require expensive repairs due to fire safety faults.(9)

Though it's little comfort to the people living in there, these cases are the natural outcome of decades of under-regulation, lack of enforcement and lobbying against better building standards.

Though the first draft was written in 1967, building regulations weren't made law until more than 20 years later.(10)

As far back as 1978, Construction Industry Federation managing director Thomas Reynolds said making any insulation mandatory in new homes would be "entirely unrealistic and bureaucratic". (11)

That same year, the Building Industry Council urged the Department of Environment to scrap its draft building regulations and re-write it "with a greater understanding of the impact such regulations will have on industry." (12)

Then in 1982, the Irish Times reported that Aidan McDonald, a Department of Environment official, told the Stardust disaster tribunal that the building industry had lobbied against a system of building inspection and approval. The department accepted the industy's arguments and decided to move towards self certification, the Times reported. (13)

Building regulations finally came into force in the early nineties, along with the self certification system that gave us Priory Hall.

In 1998, an internal Department of Environment memo acknowledged energy efficiency standards were inadequate and needed updating. "We don't want to signal this to the outside world yet because the next leap in building standard insulation will probably involve making it difficult for 'hollow block' construction, used widely in Dublin, to survive," the memo read. This was revealed in a freedom of information request to Century Homes founder Gerry McCaughey. (14)

But the department didn't update the rules for another four years, during which hundreds of thousands of homes were built.

Then in 2007, the Construction Industry Federation warned that plans to boost minimum energy efficiency standards by 40% would add €15,000 to the price of new homes. The price rise never materialised. (15)

The Irish Homes Builders Association objected to plans the same year by Dun Laoghaire - Rathdown County Council to introduce its own tough energy efficiency rules, arguing the target was unachievable. (16) But a similar standard is now in effect nationwide.

Insulating a house properly is about more than just it keeping warm.  Over 300,000 households in Ireland experience energy poverty (17). Excess winter mortality — the surplus number of people that die in winter —in Ireland was found to be double that of Norway in a 2000 study by UCD researchers Peter Clinch and Jonathan Healy. Poor building standards could be one of the main causes, the authors said (18). Clinch and Healy also found that over half of elderly households in Ireland endured "inadequate" winter temperatures in a separate study that year. (19)

Countries with the highest winter mortality — Portugal, Spain, Ireland and UK —are also those with the poorest building standards, another study  concluded the following year. (20)

The number of excess winter deaths has fallen since, and insulation standards have improved, but Ireland still experiences more excess winter deaths than the most of Europe, according to the Institute of Public Health. (21)

Upgrading and insulating our building stock could form the core of a green economic programme that would reduce fuel poverty, cut carbon emissions and save construction jobs.

But the government has slashed home energy grants in successive budgets, even though SEAI research found every euro spent delivers a net benefit of €5 to society (22). The uptake of grants has plummeted this year.(23)

Yet in some ways Ireland is actually pushing the boundary of cutting edge, low energy construction. We built the first passive house —the leading standard of ultra low energy building —in the English speaking world, and we've become a world leader in this standard. But this is down to the ambition of our best architects, designers and builders, rather than government initiatives.

On paper, our minimum standards for energy efficiency are strong, but there's little enforcement. At Construct Ireland, we frequently encounter buildings that fail to meet energy efficiency standards — either because the builder or architect doesn't understand how to comply, or because they have little fear of inspection.

In 2009, a spokesperson for the Irish Homes Builders Association said the last government's plan that all new homes be zero carbon by 2013 was "extremely costly and difficult to achieve", and said new insulation rules were "overly prescriptive".(24)

Now the Fine Gael - Labour programme for government only commits to "moving towards zero carbon homes in the longer term." The Department of Environment failed to reply to a question I sent its press office asking if the 2013 target had been dropped.

The construction industry pushed against a higher standard, and now the government is delaying it. On paper our regulations might be good, but there's still barely any enforcement. We've been here before.

Lenny Antonelli is deputy editor of Construct Ireland magazine (constructireland.ie). His personal website is  www.lennyantonelli.ie . 

1. Priory Hall debacle shows need for decisive action, Irish Times, 25 October 2011

2. Local Government Management Services Board, Service Indicators Report 2010

3. IHBA ethos to improve standards says director, Construction magazine, p29 October/November 2011

4. Unpublished SEAI report: key findings revealed, Construct Ireland, p65, Issue 9 Volume 5

5. Homes failed to meet energy and building regulations, Irish Times, 29 November 2011

6. Review of the Effectiveness of Part M of the Building Regulations, National Disability Authority, 2005

7. Presentation of the Pyrite Action Group to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment, Transport, Culture and Gaeltacht, 11 October 2011

8. Council estate rife with mould and damp, Irish Times, 3 March 2011

9. Fire safety problems found in 300 homes on Dublin estate, 23 February 2012

10. Building code to take effect in June, Irish Times, 6 December 1991

11. Question of minimum levels of insulation generates some heat, Irish Times, 18 August 1978

12. Building Industry Council rejects draft rules, Irish Times, 5 May 1978

13. Opposition by builders held up regulations, Irish Times, 6 July 1982

14. Caveat Emptor, Construct Ireland, Issue 8 Volume 2, February 2005

15. Greens unveil plans for more energy efficient homes, Irish Times, 22 September 2007

16. Architect objects to energy standards for new homes, Irish Times, 2 March 2007

17. Warmer Homes, A Strategy for Affordable Energy in Ireland, Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources

18.Housing Standards and Excess Winter Mortality, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Volume 54 Issue 9, September 2000

19. Fuel poverty, thermal comfort and occupancy: results of a national household survey in Ireland, Applied Energy, Volume 73 Issues 3-4, Nov-Dec 2002

20. Excess winter mortality in Europe: a cross country analysis identifying key risk factors, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Volume 57 Issue 10, October 2003

21. Fuel poverty and how does it contribute to health inequalities? publichealth.ie

22. Economic Analysis of Residential and Small-Business Energy Efficiency Improvements, SEAI, September 2011

23. Insulation group says jobs at risk as level of activity collapses, Construct Ireland, Issue 10 Volume 5, May 2012

24. Costs proving prohibitive for housing market, Construction magazine, p8, May 2009

Stranger in a strange land

Irish Times, 7 July, 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI takes a ramble through the empty lunar landscape of the east Burren

DO HILLWALKERS SHUN the Burren? We tend to think the only hiking destinations around these parts are in Connemara or Mayo. Sure there’s no mountains in the Burren. But walking here is unlike anywhere in Ireland – the wildlife-rich limestone is the perfect antidote to our other soggy brown hills.

The tour buses head west towards the Cliffs of Moher, but I went east instead to 326m Slieve Carran, known for its steep cliffs. A warren of tiny boreens criss-crosses the bare limestone landscape, and there’s barely a house. Just try giving directions out here. “Never have you been in stranger country,” Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote of this part of the Burren. I set out from the car park at Slieve Carran and followed the trail through a gate. Those seeking a relaxed casual ramble can take the 2.5km looped walk that circles through limestone pavement, hazel woodland and wildflower-rich grassland in a section of Burren National Park. It also visits the oratory and cave at the base of the cliff, said to have been a 7th century hermitage for St Colman Mac Duagh. With its moss-covered woodland and clear spring, it’s quite the retreat.

But I veered off the trail and up the hill left of the cliffs. This was trickier than it looked: hazel thicket blocked my path, and when I found a way through I had to scramble up a wall of rock. Soon the going got easier. Hares darted up the mountain. Early purple orchids and spring gentians were in bloom, and the strange lunar ridge of the Turloughmore hills to the east dominated my view.

I ducked under a wire fence, and over a dry stone wall that I followed northeast above the cliffs until I spotted the giant cairn on the summit to the west. Once there, I could see the mountains of Connemara across Galway Bay, and east into the Slieve Aughty hills.

I once tried to make a loop down from the summit north of the cliffs to the limestone pavement and car park below. But I was blocked by a mix of hazel thicket, farmland and steep ground, and I emerged bruised from dense scrubland. “There is a way down there, but you really have to know where you’re going,” a walker I met on top said. If you want to go back to the car park from the summit, best return the way you came. This time I ventured deeper into the grey hills, heading for a stone wall running northwest to the next hill. A herd of wild goats saw me and scurried. The going got tough as the grass vanished, and I skipped over deep fissures in the limestone. I spotted mossy carpet and thought it would make easier terrain; instead my leg plunged a metre down a crevice hidden below.

Three hundred and fifty million years ago, most of Ireland was bathed in tropical seas. The calcium-rich remains of animals such as corals, crinoids and sea urchins fell to the sea floor and compressed over the eons to form this limestone. Recent ice ages stripped surface soils and shales, smoothed the hills and scooped out the valleys. Meltwater and rain worked away at weak points in the rock to create fissures and caves.

I didn’t have time to take in the summit of Turlough Hill to the west, so I aimed north for the third hill on my route, Slieve Oughtmama. I kept following the dry stone wall – which marks the Clare-Galway border – to this final summit. The glassy surface of Galway Bay mirrored the blue sky. The landscape was divided sharply between grey hills, lime valleys and the azure bay.

I followed the stone wall down the limestone ridge towards my end point on the N67 by the coast. But the crevices were deeper than ever now, the rocks further apart, and the stone looser. A common lizard scurried under a rock. I stared deep into a dark fissure at ferns and wildflowers growing down below. This is strange country indeed.

Burren Beo Trust, burrenbeo.com

East Burren, Co Clare

Map: Ordnance Survey. Discovery Series. Sheet 52 for Slieve Carran. Sheet 51 for rest of walk.

Start: Car park at Slieve Carran, northwest of Carran village, Co Clare. Grid reference M 333 034. Heading west from Kinvara take the first left immediately after the town onto the Moy Road. Continue for about 7km, taking the first right after the crossroads. The car park is about 1km down on the right.

Finish: N67 at Abbey Hill between Kinvara and Ballyvaughan. There is also a looped walk marked from the Slieve Carran car park and Tony Kirby’s book The Burren Aran Islands: A Walking Guide also details another loop in the area.

Distance : 9km.

Time: Four hours.

Suitability : Moderate to strenuous for the full route. Involves some scrambling and hopping stone walls, and the terrain can be demanding. Watch out for hidden crevices and sudden cliffs. You will probably encounter horses and cattle en route, so give them a wide berth. Bring rain gear, warm clothes, map, compass, food, phone and fluids. Sturdy boots essential.

Food and services: Shop and pub at Bellharbour, a few miles west of my end point. More services in Kinvara, Gort, Corofin and Ballyvaughan.

Further information : Information on marked trails from Burren National Park

burrennationalpark.ie.

The quieter side

From The Irish Times, 26 May, 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI finds a quieter way up Ireland’s busiest mountain

THERE’S MORE TO Croagh Patrick than the slog for repentance up the old track from Murrisk to redemption at the summit. If it’s solitude you seek, you could traverse the entire range of hills.

The Reek – as she’s known locally – sits dead centre of a ridge with lower hills both sides. Hiking the whole range offers one of the best walks in the west, but the traditional way up is so popular few consider it. On a clear day we followed an off-road section of the Western Way outside Westport until we reached a gap leading on to open mountainside. Ignoring the markers heading northwest, we hiked to the first spot height in the range of 456m, hopping a stone wall on the way.

The view grabs you instantly: south to isolated brown hills and valleys of Partry, Maumstrasna and Sheeffry and north over Clew bay to the mountains beyond. Croagh Patrick forms the southern end of the huge ice-carved valley that is Clew Bay, with the Nephin Beg mountains on the other side, and drumlins left by the ice forming the bay’s clustered islands.

We headed west through the heather on grassy mountainside towards the next spot height of 500m. The terrain was soft and springy – nothing like what lay ahead. In the distance, swarms of walkers scurried up and down Croagh Patrick. We joined a narrow track on the south side of the hills, heading towards them.

When we hit the main, path dozens of pilgrims were heading up and down. “Charity walk,” one told us. “You just missed Enda Kenny and Trapattoni.” Kids ran down the scree as we struggled up, our first time climbing the Reek. Soon the track got steeper, the rock looser and the crowds denser.

There was nowhere to rest. Descending walkers sent rocks hurtling towards us. “It was lovely back there,” my hiking companion said. “But this feels a bit like a building site.”

But from the summit it’s obvious why this mountain has been a site of ritual since pre-Christian times. The view from the austere peak – over Clew Bay, the mountains of Mayo and the islands of Clare and Inishturk – is one of the country’s best. Cold northerly winds blasted the peak. A man wearing just a vest began circling the chapel on the summit, but we didn’t have time to see if he went around the traditional 15 times.

Rather than head down the main track, we carried on west towards our final summit, Ben Goram. The descent on this side of Croagh Patrick is full of loose rock too, so make it a slow one.

A wall of rain descended on the Partry Mountains to the south, but the skies above us were clear blue. Soon we were back on the dry moss and heather, descending to a low pass before going up to 559m Ben Goram. A paraglider sailed through the skies over the bay.

We lingered on the hillside, but as the sun went down behind Clare Island we descended the gradual ridge northwest from the summit of Ben Goram. Watch your footing closely on the steep terrain here. We arrived back to a boreen west of Lecanvey, a good spot to leave a second car. Or you could check beforehand to see if there’s a 450 bus heading to Westport, which could leave you near the start point.

Locals in the pub afterwards were discussing whether Trapattoni had made it all the way up; he didn’t. It turns out the FAI scheduled a press conference at the visitor centre for 15 minutes after the walk started, so Trap reluctantly turned back.

I found myself thinking of the stark contrast between Croagh Patrick and the hills around it – from a gruelling cone of loose rock to green, grassy hillsides.

Just then, a woman at the bar interrupted the talk of how tough the climb is. “Ah sure, I climbed the Reek last year,” she said. “And I’m only 74.”

Croagh Patrick ridge walk, Mayo

Map : Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Discovery Series. These hills are at the intersection of four maps: 30, 31, 37, 38. If you follow the route described, you’ll need all bar 38.

Start : Take the R335 from Westport towards Louisburgh. Turn left just after the petrol station and bridge in Belclare. Then take the second right until you reach a waymarker for the Western Way at a gate on the left. Grid reference L 949 809.

Route : Take the trail until you reach a ladder on the right that brings you on to open mountain. Rather than follow markers for the Croagh Patrick Heritage Trail, aim for the first spot height of 456m. For easy navigation you could follow the stone wall that runs on the south face of these hills, marked on the OS map (31) as “Pilgrim’s Walk”.

Finish : Heading west from Westport on the R335, take the first left after Lecanvey village, then the first left again. You should find parking here. Grid reference L 876 804.

Suitability : Moderate except for the tough ascent of Croagh Patrick. Walking poles are ideal. The mountainside is often misty, so you must know how to navigate.

Time : 4-6 hours.

Distance : 10km.

Services : Westport. Food, hot showers and lockers at Croagh Patrick Visitor Centre in Murrisk. Pubs in Murrisk and Lecanvey.

Half of new homes fail energy efficiency rules

By Lenny Antonelli & Jeff Colley The Sunday Times (Irish edition), 20 May, 2012

More than half of new Irish homes fail to meet energy efficiency and carbon emissions regulations, according to new figures. The number of new homes meeting the rules has also declined dramatically since 2005, according to data released by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.

The figures show 50% of homes fail to meet energy performance rules, 40% fail to meet carbon emission standards, and 39% don't generate enough renewable energy to meet regulations.

The data, which contains a record of the energy performance of every new home given a building energy rating (BER) assessment, was obtained by the green building magazine Construct Ireland.

Of the 3,595 BER assessments carried out on houses built to the 2008 version of Part L of the building regulations, which deals with insulation and energy, 1,946 — or 54% — fail at least one of the three main standards.

This marked a dramatic increase from the 21% of homes built to the 2005 regulations that failed to meet its main requirements. Part L was updated again last far, but few homes have been built to this new version.

Environment minister Phil Hogan recently published a new draft Building Control Act following the high profile evacuation of the Priory Hall development in north Dublin due to fire safety defects. The new rules require the submission of "certificates of compliance" for the design and construction of buildings.

However in a lengthy submission former president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland Eoin O'Cofaigh heavily criticised the proposals. He said the regulations would "criminalise" architects for the failure of local authorities to inspect buildings, and for the failure of other contractors on site. Local authorities currently have a target to inspect just 12-15% of new buildings.

Mr O'Cofaigh, a former member for the Building Regulations Advisory Body, said the proposals were the "21st century equivalent of hanging children for stealing sheep."

Last year Construct Ireland  revealed that an unpublished survey of Irish housing built between 1997 and 2002 commissioned by the SEAI found that none of the houses examined complied fully with energy efficiency regulations. Over 90% of of homes with oil boilers failed to comply with rules on reducing the risk of fire spread and pollution from oil tanks, while over 40% failed to meet ventilation standards.

Infra red photography of housing conducted as part of the survey found that 19 out of 20 houses had gaps in insulation, in contravention of the regulations, that were not revealed by basic visual inspections. This suggest the number of homes failing to meet insulation standards today could be higher than the latest SEAI data indicates, as BER assessors typically assume on-paper specifications are correct if they can't access insulation.

SEAI is planning to release a public research tool to enable users to study the BER data it has collected. The next issue of Construct Ireland magazine will contain further analysis of the latest figures. The Department of Environment did not respond to a request for comment from The Sunday Times in time for print.

This is the original version of the story we submitted as opposed to the final version that appeared in the Sunday Times, as their edit is not available online. 

Untamed Achill

From the Irish Times, 31 March, 2012

LENNY ANTONELLI takes a clifftop walk in one of the country’s wildest corners on Achill

ACHILL’S BEEN in the news so much for developer Joe McNamara’s Stonehenge imitation it’s easy to forget the wildest thing about the island isn’t the planning, but the intoxicating landscape. The most untamed terrain here is the island’s western corner, which wowed the English travel writer J Harris Stone in 1906 with its “sheer frowning precipices, no less than two thousand feet in height, and chaotically disarranged boulders of giant proportions, round which the Atlantic rollers fume and smoke”.

I set out from Keem strand, a sheltered cove with blue-green waters surrounded by steep hills, and the likely setting of Paul Henry’s painting Launching the Currach. Above the beach lie the remains of Captain Charles Boycott’s estate. When his house here was burned down, he built another on the opposite side of Croaghaun mountain. The remains of an altar where Catholic priests said secret Mass during penal times are here too.

From the car park, hike the steep 200m to the second World War lookout on the hill above. The climb is tough, but it’s the most challenging part of an otherwise moderate walk. You’ll be greeted on top by the jagged Benmore cliffs that drop into the Atlantic below.

Keem Bay was home to a major basking shark fishery between 1950 and 1975. A lookout would stalk the sharks from the headland, directing fisherman in their currachs who would sneak up on the giants of the ocean and kill them with the jab of a lance behind the head. The fishery landed more than 12,000 of the species between 1950 and 1975.

Heading away from Keem, follow the line of cliffs towards Achill Head, the island’s western tip. Some faint trails have been etched out, but they can be tricky to follow. The cliff edge overhangs in places too, so keep well back, perhaps following the intermittent sod barrier.

Perched on a clifftop above the empty Atlantic on the edge of Europe, the weather here can change in moments. As I walked along, mist rapidly rose up and over the cliffs, fogging up the valley below. Pick a clear day to tackle this one.

As you near the back of the island, the vastness of the landscape reveals itself. The cliffs below stretch a mile out to Achill Head. The empty valley lies pockmarked with lakes and, on the other side, Croaghaun drops 688m into the sea, making it three times higher than the Cliffs of Moher and one of Europe’s highest sea cliffs. The Mullet Peninsula lies to the northeast, with Clare Island, Inishturk and the mountains of Mayo and Galway to the south.

Make a gradual descent to the stone ruins on the valley floor. These are the remains of the deserted booley village of Bunowna, a summer settlement for herders who would bring their livestock here to graze. The terrain here is wet and boggy, so cross the valley and make your way back to Keem on higher ground. The isolation is splendid; just over an hour from the car park, you find yourself in one of Ireland’s wildest spots.

As I neared Keem, mist descended on the valley. Sheep appeared and quickly disappeared in the fog, and I heard ravens circling overhead. Suddenly, four birds swooped in front of me, crossing the valley, before the fog consumed them again as I made the final descent back to the beach.

Start and finish: Car park at Keem strand. To get to Achill, follow signs to Newport from either Westport or Castlebar. From Newport take the N59 to Mulranny, then take the R319 all the way to Keem at the western end of Achill, passing through the villages of Achill Sound, Keel and Dooagh.

Time: 2-3 hours.

Distance: 7km.

Map: Ordnance Survey Discovery Series, sheet 30.

Suitability: Moderate. By far the most challenging part of the walk is the initial steep climb to the clifftop.

Good boots and waterproofs are essential though, as the terrain can be very boggy, particular on the valley floor, and the weather can change quickly, with strong winds and fog posing obvious risks. Watch your footing closely on the cliffs.

Food and services: Shops, pubs and accommodation in Dooagh and Keel villages.

Further information: achilltourism.com/hillwalking

The very loneliest place

From The Irish Times, 18 February.

LENNY ANTONELLI takes a ten hour trek through the wilderness of north Mayo.

FOR CENTURIES FARMERS used the Bangor Trail to take livestock through the Nephin Beg mountains and the vast Owenduff bog, now part of Mayo’s Ballycroy National Park.

Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger described this landscape as “the very loneliest place in the country” in his 1937 book The Way That I Went.

“The hills themselves are encircled by this vast area of trackless bog,” he wrote. “I confess I find such a place not lonely or depressing but inspiring. You are thrown at the same time back upon yourself and forward against the mystery and majesty of nature.” We park beside the bothy – a stone shelter for hikers – at Letterkeen Wood, north of Newport. Many walkers begin in the town, but the trail from there is mostly on-road. From Letterkeen it’s 25km of wilderness before we’ll hit Tarmac again.

Local hiking guide Barry Murphy of Tourism Pure Walking joins us. After crossing the Altaconey River, the track skirts the edge of the huge conifer plantation. Something on the riverbank catches Murphy’s eye. “Otter droppings,” he says. “Smells like white wine.”

Many walkers loop back to Letterkeen at the end of the plantation but we carry on past Nephin Beg mountain, crossing nameless streams that feed the bog. Scots pine trees once covered this land, but about 4,000 years ago Ireland’s climate grew wetter. Heavy rainfall washed minerals down through the soil, waterlogging the land. Mosses took over, bog formed and the forest withered.

We take a detour for lunch to the Scardaun Loughs in the valley between Nephin Beg and Slieve Carr.

Heading back to the trail, we cross a ravine sheltering a lone oak tree. “The only tree on the Bangor Trail,” Murphy says. The trail skirts the edge of Slieve Carr, known by hikers as Ireland’s remotest mountain, and passes the stone ruins of old farmsteads. Ravens circle overhead.

“I’ve never seen the trail this dry,” Barry says. This provokes laughter, as we frequently plunge shin-deep into the bog. The trail is as wet as it is remote. Barry says the biggest mistake hikers could make is to try and save time by walking straight across the bog – those who built the trail kept it high enough to avoid deep bog but low enough to prevent needless climbing.

The terrain varies from rocky to extremely wet, and at points it’s hard to follow, making navigation skills vital. Timber and stone tracks are now being laid on parts. We emerge into the desolate Tarsaghaunmore valley, with the river meandering across the landscape. A small farmstead in the distance provides the first sign of modern civilisation we’ve seen for hours. Because of our late (9.30am) start, we’ll be hiking the last few miles in the dark. We put on headlamps to tackle the last low hills as the lights of Bangor Erris appear in the distance. Exhausted, we reach a road outside the village after 10 hours hiking. Tackling the Bangor Trail is a serious task, particularly in winter. It demands experience, willpower, and the right gear. But the effort expended will reward you with a breathtaking trek through one of Ireland’s last wildernesses.

Bangor Trail, Co Mayo

Map : Ordnance Survey. Discovery Series. Sheet 23

Start: Brogan Carroll bothy at Letterkeen Wood, 12km north of Newport, Co Mayo.

Leaving Newport take the N59 towards Achill and turn right after 1km at the sign for Bangor Trail/Letterkeen Loop.

Follow for 10km until Letterkeen forest, then continue to follow Bangor Trail/ Letterkeen Loop signs to the bothy.

Finish : Bangor Erris village. Leaving a second car here before the hike would be ideal, but we left bicycles in order to cycle back to Letterkeen the next day.

Route: This is not an official waymarked way, but there is some sparse marking on the trail. At grid reference F889131, make sure to turn left to follow the stream as directed by the marker, rather than following the track off to the right. Not all streams along the way have bridges, and some may be difficult to cross after heavy rainfall.

Time: 8-12 hours

Distance: 25km

Suitability: Strenuous. Physical fitness, good hiking boots and rain gear, warm clothing, plenty of food and water, hiking experience and navigation skills all essential.

Out of the woods

 From the Irish Times, 23 March 2012

A walk along Lough Mask offers rich rewards, writes LENNY ANTONELLI

WALKERS HEADING to the mountains of Galway and Mayo could easily overlook the isthmus between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, but this narrow neck of land offers big rewards to those who explore it. There’s excellent walking around the villages of Cong, Clonbur and Cornamona, on lakeshore, woodland and hillside trails. On a mild March morning I set off from Cong Abbey, on the edge of the village. The mixed woodland here boasts a warren of trails and impressive trees, including redwoods and sequoias. Lord Ardilaun – a member of the Guinness family best known for donating St Stephen’s Green to the public – planted many of them, and most trails here run through his family’s old estate.

The track to Clonbur winds around the forest and through old stone tunnels before entering Clonbur Wood. Signs of large-scale tree harvesting are apparent here, but you should aim for the superb northern end of the wood.

You’ll come to a Y-junction at an information sign where the leftwards trail heads for Clonbur: take the right instead. This brings you to the limestone pavement on Lough Mask’s southern shore, the largest example of this habitat in Ireland outside the Burren. The habitat is a patchwork of shrubs, trees, wetland and open limestone pavement. A Coillte project has restored 550 hectares (1,360 acres) of woodland, removing exotic species in favour of native vegetation.

Don’t miss the superb signposted detour around White Island, where the track hugs the shores of Lough Mask. I stopped for lunch on a limestone clearing at the water’s edge. Sailors on the lake in the distance were the first people I’d seen since leaving Cong two hours before.

Leaving White Island, you can follow paths back to Cong through the same woods. You could turn right on a trail south of the R300 marked for Ard na Gaoithe Forest, a pleasant mixed woodland with trails along the shore of Lough Corrib, and a safe swimming area. But the biggest attraction lies further west. The Seanbóthar is a little-known 10km (6.2-mile) trail that follows the old road from Clonbur to Cornamona, and it’s one of the best paved trails in Ireland.

From Clonbur Wood follow signs for the village or the cemetery outside it. From Clonbur join the road to Cornamona and take the second right. When you come to a T-junction go right again. Soon the road becomes a car-free path.

The Seanbóthar winds across the southern flanks of Benlevy (also known as Mount Gable, 416m/1,365ft), crossing stone-walled fields that extend up the hillside. There are excellent views over Lough Corrib and its countless islands.

The remote hills and valleys of Joyce Country, named after a Welsh family that settled here in the 13th century, open up before you marking the transition from a landscape of forests, fields and lakes to the mountains of Connemara, with the Maamturk range lurking in the background.

To gain access to the summit of Benlevy, which offers a wonderful panorama, take the right turn before the T-junction I mentioned and heading for a townland named Ballard on the OSI map. Look out for a ladder stile beside a gate on your right that provides access to the hillside. You can then head down to Lough Coolin on the northern side of the hill.

Cong to Connemara

Map: Ordnance Survey. Discovery Series. Sheet 38

Start: Cong village, Co Mayo. From Galway take the N84 to Headford; turn left on to the R334 to Cross village. Then take the R346 to Cong.

Finish: Cornamona, Co Galway. If a linear walk is impractical, there are plenty of opportunities for looped walks around Cong Forest, Clonbur Wood and Benlevy/Lough Coolin.

Time: Two to three hours for each leg: Cong to Clonbur, Seanbóthar and Benlevy/Lough Coolin.

Distance: Cong to Clonbur: 8km, Seanbóthar (Clonbur to Cornamona): 10km. Plus a further 2.3km of trails at Ard na Gaoithe.

Suitability: Moderate. With its well-marked trails and low hills the area is suitable for everyone, but Benlevy requires care as the terrain is steep and wet in places – navigation skills and rain gear are vital in poor weather. You can make your route as easy or as strenuous as you like, but some of the forest trails can be churned up, so good boots are crucial.

F ood and services: Cong, Clonbur, Cornamona. Tourist office in Cong.

Further information: See irishtrails.ieand coillteoutdoors.ie for maps, route information and looped walk options.

Tapping in to high technology's heavyweight history

Published in The Irish Times, 4 November, 2011 An exhibition in Galway pays homage to Ireland’s small role in the history of tech manufacturing, writes  Lenny Antonelli

JUST A month after the death of Steve Jobs, it’s fitting that the first exhibit you see inside Galway’s new National Computer and Communications Museum showcases some of Apple’s most iconic computers, including the original 1984 Macintosh.

“It was the first popular computer to use a graphics interface – to use windows, to use icons and to use a mouse,” curator Brendan Smith says of the first Mac. “There was a little programme on it showing people how to use a mouse.”

Beside it sits an Apple II, one of the world’s first popular desktop computers. On its underside are words rarely seen on computers today: Made in Ireland. Apple opened a factory in Cork in 1981, its first outside the US.

The new museum pays homage to Ireland’s small role in the history of tech manufacturing – among its exhibits are a telephone exchange built in Galway by Nortel, floppy disks made in Limerick by Verbatim, and a 6ft “minicomputer” manufactured here in the 1970s by Digital.

But the museum’s centrepiece is a row of classic computers from the 1970s and 80s, including the famous BBC Micro. The broadcaster launched the machine in 1981 to accompany TV shows on computer education. More than a million were sold, mostly to schools. The machine was designed to link up easily with other devices, such as musical equipment. The bands A-Ha, Depeche Mode and Erasure all used it to compose songs.

Sitting next to the BBC Micro is a rarity: the Dragon, the only desktop computer ever designed and built in Wales. Launched in 1982, the machine flopped partly because its keyboard only had upper-case letters – its manufacturer failed to take heed of the growing demand for word processing.

The Apprentice’s Sir Alan Sugar didn’t make that mistake when he launched the Amstrad CPC, also on display. “He looked at offices full of people, full of secretaries, and what were they using? They were using an electronic typewriter,” Smith says. So in 1984 he launched his computer to the mass market. The range stayed in production for eight years, sold three million units, and sent Sugar on his way to vast wealth.

The museum also charts the history of the the laptop, boasting a 1983 Compaq Portable – a huge and heavy computer dubbed a “luggable” that was only deemed portable because it folded up and had a handle on top.

It also features one of Motorola’s classic 1980s “brick” mobile phones. Smith points out that watching Captain Kirk use a handheld “communicator” in Star Trek inspired Motorola’s Martin Cooper to develop the first mobile phone. Technologies such as the tablet computer and voice translation software were also inspired by the classic sci-fi show.

Space travel, real or fictional, had a heavy influence on early computer games such as Space Invaders and Asteroid. Both can be found in the museum’s retro-gaming area, home to iconic machines such as the Atari and the Sega Mega Drive. The museum runs retro-gaming nights each month and teaches computer programming to kids by showing them how to input and manipulate the code for classic games.

Smith is also expecting delivery of a full-size arcade machine soon. “We’re going to get a school to build up the electronics behind it. It’s not just a museum piece, it will be built by children,” he says. Plans are also afoot for classes for children on building mobile apps. Smith wants the museum to inspire children to become Ireland’s tech innovators of the future.

The museum also charts Ireland’s role in the development of modern communications, from the laying of the first underwater telegraph cable from Valentia Island to Newfoundland, to Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering work in Ireland on long-distance radio communication. “Marconi’s mother grabbed him, brought him over [from Italy] to London and introduced him to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that she was a part of, being from the Jameson whiskey family,” Smith says.

“He got his seed capital from people like them. She introduced him. Like any Irish mother, she was quite pushy.”

Marconi would go on to develop the first regular wireless telegraph across the Atlantic, between Clifden and Canada.

Radio technology spread rapidly after that, and one engaging display at the museum suggests the world’s first general radio broadcast might have been sent by Irish republicans in Dublin during the Rising on Easter Monday 1916. Before this, transmissions were directed to specific recipients. “They definitely did send out a broadcast, whether anybody picked it up or not, who knows,” Smith says. The group’s message read: “Irish Republic declared in Dublin today. Irish troops have captured city and are in full possession. Enemy cannot move in city. The whole country is rising.”

The era of mass broadcast arrived soon after – the museum features classic radios from the 1930s and 50s – and brought huge cultural and social change. Radio stations started catering to a new, youthful audience.

“For the first time you had young people that dressed differently, had different types of hairstyle, different types of social attitudes, and different types of music,” Smith says. “You had young people in Warsaw, in Dublin, in London, in Washington, listening to the same type of music.”

In the 1950s Sony popularised the pocket transistor radio, another of the museum’s artefacts. “The great thing for young people was that it had batteries, it meant that you got away from plugging it into the wall, from the house, from the parents.”

Smith says some of his older students are often intimated by MP3 players and smartphones. “They think it’s totally for young people and that it’s kind of scary.” Then he takes out his 1950s pocket radio. “I say to them that over 50 years ago, you scared the pants off your parents, you were the teenagers at the time listening to anything and everything. Nothing has really changed.”

The National Computer and Communications Museum is in NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute. 

Tapping into high technology's heavyweight history

An exhibition in Galway pays homage to Irelands small role in the history of tech manufacturing, writes Lenny Antonelli Irish Times, 4 November 2011

Less than a month after the death of Steve Jobs, it’s fitting that the first exhibit you see inside Galway’s new National Computer and Communications Museum showcases some of Apple’s most iconic computers, including the original 1984 Macintosh.

“It was the first popular computer to use a graphics interface — to use windows, to use icons and to use a mouse,” curator Brendan Smith says of the first Mac. “There was a little programme on it showing people how to use a mouse.”

Beside it sits an Apple II, one of the world’s first popular desktop computers. On its underside are words rarely seen on computers today: Made in Ireland.  Apple opened a factory in Cork in 1981, its first outside the US. The new museum pays homage to Ireland’s small role in the history of tech manufacturing — among its exhibits are a telephone exchange built in Galway by Nortel, floppy disks made in Limerick by Verbatim, and a six foot high “minicomputer” manufactured here in the 1970s by Digital.

But the museum’s centrepiece is a row of classic computers from the 1970s and 80s, including the famous BBC Micro. The broadcaster launched the machine in 1981 to accompany TV shows on computer education and sold over one million, mostly to schools. The machine was designed to link-up easily with other devices, such as musical equipment — A-Ha, Depeche Mode and Erasure all used it to compose songs.

Sitting next to the BBC Micro in the museum is a rarity: the Dragon, the only desktop computer ever designed and built in Wales. Launched in 1982, the machine flopped partly because its keyboard only had upper-case letters — its manufacturer failed to take heed of the growing demand for word processing.

The Apprentice’s Sir Alan Sugar didn't make that mistake when he launched the Amstrad CPC, also on display. “He looked at offices full of people, full of secretaries, and what were they using? They were using electronic typewriters,” Smith says. So in 1984 he launched his computer to the mass market. The range stayed in production for eight years, sold three million units, and sent Sugar on his way to vast wealth.

The museum also charts the history of the laptop too, boasting a 1983 Compaq Portable — a huge and heavy computer known as the “luggable” that was only deemed portable because it folded up and had a handle on top.

It also features one of Motorola’s classic 1980s “brick” mobile phones. Smith points out that watching Captain Kirk use a handheld “communicator” in Star Trek inspired Motorola’s Martin Cooper to develop the first mobile phone. Technologies such as the tablet computer and voice translation software were also inspired by the classic sci fi show.

Space travel — real or fictional — had a heavy influence on early computer games like Space Invaders and Asteroid too. Both can be found in the museum’s retro gaming area, home to iconic machines such as the Atari and the Sega Mega Drive. The museum runs retro gaming nights each month and teaches computer programming to kids by showing them how to input and manipulate the code for classic games.

Smith’s also expecting delivery of a full-size arcade machine soon. “We’re going to get a school to build up the electronics behind it. It’s not just a museum piece, it will be built by children,” he says. Plans are also afoot for classes that teach school kids how to build mobile apps — Smith wants the museum to inspire kids to become Ireland’s tech innovators of the future.

The museum also charts Ireland’s role in development of modern communications, from the laying of the first underwater telegraph cable from Valentia Island to Newfoundland, to Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering work in Ireland on long distance radio communication.

“Marconi’s mother grabbed him, brought him over [from Italy] to London and introduced him to the Anglo Irish aristocracy that she was a part of, being from the Jameson whiskey family,” Smith says. “He got his seed capital from people like them. She introduced him, like any Irish mother she was quite pushy.”  Marconi would go on to develop the first regular wireless telegraph across the Atlantic between Clifden and Canada.

Radio technology spread rapidly after that, and one engaging display at the museum suggests the world’s first general radio broadcast might have been sent by Irish republicans in Dublin during the uprising on Easter Monday 1916. Before this, transmissions were directed to specific recipients. “They definitely did send out a broadcast, whether anybody picked it up or not who knows,” Smith says. The group’s message read: “Irish republic declared in Dublin today. Irish troops have captured city and are in full possession. Enemy cannot move in city. The whole country is rising.”

The era of mass broadcast arrived soon after —  the museum features classic radios from the 1930s and 50s — and brought huge cultural and social change. Radio stations started catering to a new, youthful audience. “For the first time you had young people that dressed differently, had different types of hairstyle, different types of social attitudes, and different types of music,” Smith says. “You had young people in Warsaw, in Dublin, in London, in Washington, listening to the same type of music.”

In the 1950s Sony popularised the pocket transistor radio, another of the museum’s artefacts. “The great thing for young people was that it had batteries, it meant that you got away from plugging it into the wall, from the house, from the parents.”

Smith says older people he teaches computers to are often intimated by mp3 players and smartphones. “They think it’s totally for young people and that it’s kind of scary,” he says. But then he takes out his 1950s pocket radio. “I say to them that over 50 years ago you scared the pants off your parents, you were the teenagers at the time listening to anything and everything,” he says. “Nothing has really changed.”

The National Computer and Communications Museum is located at NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute. It will open to the public from 14 November.

Growing food on ghost estates

Published in Organic Matters magazine, December 2010 Urban agriculture is thriving in rundown Detroit as communities take over derelict sites to grow food. But with our thousands of ghost estates and other leftovers from the property boom, could Ireland plough a similar path? Lenny Antonelli reports.

When Detroit native Mark Covington lost his job as an environmental engineer and moved back to his old neighbourhood, he decided to get to work improving the rundown area. He cleaned up an empty lot and planted fruit and vegetables, allowing locals to harvest the food for free.

Covington wanted to buy a nearby derelict building and turn it into a community centre too, but he couldn’t get a grant or loan. Then journalist Paul Harris profiled Covington’s project in the Guardian, and an anonymous donor appeared with the cash. Covington’s Georgia Street neighbourhood has been transformed: disadvantaged locals can now harvest free food, kids watch movies at an outdoor cinema and the community holds regular street parties.

Detroit’s decline is infamous. Once an industrial giant, in the 1960s the city was the fourth largest in the US and home to two million people. Its population is now just 900,000, and one third of the city — an area of land the size of San Francisco — is derelict.

But grassroots community projects are revitalising the city, and urban farming projects like Covington’s are thriving. Last year alone over 900 food plots were created, and plans are afoot to establish the world’s largest urban farm in the city.

Here in Ireland, the Department of Environment revealed last month that we have 2,800 ghost estates. Over 75,000 occupied homes now sit within unfinished estates, and a further 58,000 sites have planning permission for houses that remain unbuilt. Meanwhile, Nama (the National Asset Management Agency) is taking over property loans worth tens of billions of euro.

Nobody seems to have started growing food on ghost estates or Nama property yet. But plenty of groups have proposed it, including the South Dublin Allotments Association, which suggested the idea in a submission to Nama.

“We did a submission on the idea of using the land on an interim basis as allotments on smaller sites, and where there are larger sites we figured they could be used for… commercial growers, for people who are market gardeners,” says the SDAA’s Michael Fox.

The group submitted a comprehensive list of reasons why growing food on Nama property makes sense, from preventing dereliction to encouraging food independence, developing growing skills at a time of unemployment and creating small businesses that could sell produce at farmers’ markets. The idea makes sense for Fox — “all it takes is a little bit of collaboration and cohesive planning,” he says — but Nama didn’t bite.

But the SDAA aren’t the only ones pushing the idea.  An Taisce suggested it in their submission to Nama, while Dublin City Council’s latest draft development plan states that derelict sites in the city should be used for “community gardens, allotments, local markets and pocket parks.”

In 2005 Kaethe Burt-O’Dea set up a community garden on a derelict plot in Stoneybatter, in Dublin’s north city.  The garden has thrived, and so has the community around it — locals now hold street parties twice a year, and Burt-O’Dea is spearheading a campaign to turn a stretch of abandoned railway line nearby — long taken over by wildlife — into a public green space. Students from Dublin Institute of Technology have undertaken research for the rail line project as part of the Community Links programme at the college.

Burt-O’Dea and volunteers cleaned-up the line and surveyed its biodiversity earlier this year. She brims with enthusiasm about the possibilities for a space she calls a “secret garden” — not only its potential for growing food and sheltering wildlife, but also as a walking and cycling route that encourages healthy, green transport. “The way we build our environment has so much to do with the health of the population,” she says, adding:  “I really see it as an education space, in the same way that in a community garden you learn without being told.” The site is eventually earmarked for a Luas line, but Burt-O’Dea says her vision of a green urban corridor can co-exist with the tram.

She might not be growing food on ghost estates, but Burt-O’Dea is certainly breathing new life into derelict spaces.  Those thinking of making ghost estates productive might find another template in Dublin’s art scene. As the economy collapsed and businesses closed over the past three years, many buildings in Dublin became vacant — or just never found occupants in the first place  — and rents dropped, allowing artists to start studios and galleries cheaply. Spaces that would otherwise be dormant became hubs for artists to work, exhibit and run events.

Now the current programme for government promises to provide free space for community groups and visual artists to display their work too, hinting that Nama properties could be used for this.  The Department of Education is examining whether some Nama sites are suitable for school building, and the HSE and other government departments are believed to be interested too.

Professor Rob Kitchin of the geography department at at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth has suggested some Nama properties could be used for schools, forestry or parks, while in September a letter in the Irish Times argued the state should hold on to Nama properties in the medium term and lease them out for socially useful activities. Others have floated the idea of using vacant housing in good condition for low cost rent-to-buy schemes, to provide shelter for the homeless, or even for squatting.

Ghost estates and Nama properties could be used for a raft of exciting ideas — growing food is just one of many. A Nama committee is examining what to do with the properties, and while bigger ideas like turning failed hotels into hospitals or prisons are unlikely to materialise, there are much simpler ways to use the property for public good.

Projects like Burt-O’Dea’s offer an inspiring example. She stresses that it’s often small grassroots projects like that really transform a town. “If you energise an area, then it becomes attractive,” she says. One small community garden can be a catalyst for dozens of other projects that revitalise derelict spaces — and now it’s surely only a matter of time before the idea spreads to land leftover from the property boom. “Getting people to think differently about a city gradually,” Burt-O’Dea says. “That’s how real change happens.”

The Christmas drink diaries

Note: this is my version. As you'll see the Irish Times's edit made me a sound a bit more repentant at the end than I actually was. Published in The Irish Times, January 2011

I spent the holidays at home in Galway as usual. My only drink on Christmas Eve was a glass of white wine, which I used to wash down some crabmeat, brown bread and chocolate cheesecake (though not in the same mouthful) at a friend's house. I planned to soberly spend Christmas Day geeking out over my new David Attenborough DVDs, but my mother had other ideas. "Why don't we watch The Notebook?" she insisted, with my 15 year old sister backing her up. I reckoned my naggin of whiskey and four small bottles of Grolsch would be enough to make the film tolerable. It wasn't nearly. I had pretty much the same St Stephen's Day experience I suspect most people do: pretend to have fun while spending most of the night queuing for the bar or fighting to hold on to an area of dancefloor the size of your foot. Total drinks consumed? Three small bottles of Grolsch and two big bottles of Erdinger before going out, and four pints of Galway Hooker pale ale in the pub.

I spent the evening of the 27th in a bar relaxing over two pints of Galway Hooker and a Hoegaarden while watching the love of my life, Arsenal Football Club, thump Chelsea 3-1. The following evening I stopped by a friend's house with a rucksack full of booze, but only drank one Erdinger and three Grolsch while failing miserably at Buzz Junior, a Playstation game designed for kids aged three and up.

I embraced sobriety on the 29th (or rather I couldn't find anyone willing to go to the pub with me) but made up for it the next night, which started with two pints of Galway Hooker and a pint of Pilsner Urquell at half five, followed by four whiskey and cokes with some friends in their hotel room. Then back to the pub for four pints of Galway Hooker, after which going to a friend's house at 3am for two gin and tonics seemed like a perfectly logical idea.

New year's eve started at a friend's house with three whiskey and cokes and a Grolsch. At 11pm I left for a party outside the city. Most people there seem convinced that getting into the sauna was the best way to start the new the new year — after my seventh whiskey and coke it seemed an absurd suggestion, but after my eighth it made perfect sense.

And that was that. Though my mother has just suggested I join her to watch Poseidon — the remake — tonight (I'm writing this on New Year's Day) so I might still need a last nightcap or two. I'm feeling fairly exhausted, and aware that I drank far too much over the holidays. But gross overconsumption at Christmas gives us the motivation to spend at least the first two weeks of the new year being healthy, before lazily and inevitably regressing into bad habits again. And that's better than not trying at all, right?

Lenny Antonelli is a journalist based in Dublin

Teaching the teachers

Published in Village magazine, January 2011 The Department of Education has announced plans to revamp teacher training in line with some of the best education systems in the world. But will it make a difference? Lenny Antonelli reports

Training for most secondary school teachers is inadequate, the Department of Education has admitted. This surprising statement is found in a new plan that proposes a major revamp of teacher training in Ireland. The Better Literacy and Numeracy for Children and Young People plan says that the typical nine-month graduate teaching course "cannot adequately prepare the great majority of post-primary teachers for developing the skills required to teach or progress their students' literacy and numeracy skills." "There's not enough time to do anything well in nine months," Dr Jim Gleeson of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Limerick told Village. "There's an increasing realisation that in a lot of European countries the teacher education experience is longer."

The plan proposes a shake-up of training for aspiring primary and secondary teachers. College courses for both will be extended by one year, and students will spend more time engaging in teaching practice in the classrooms of "high quality" teachers. Newly qualified teachers will get further support from mentors, while further training will be mandatory for teachers during their careers. More emphasis will be placed on literacy and numeracy in schools, and on standardised testing.

The document is only at draft stage, and the Teaching Council  — which promotes and regulates teaching in Ireland — will soon make more thorough recommendations on teacher training. But the plan appears to be based on strong international evidence that great teaching is at the heart of the world's best education systems. Despite having a major impact on students teaching quality is rarely debated in Ireland.

In 2007, consultants McKinsey published How The World's Best-Performing School Systems Come Out On Top, a detailed look at what traits the world's best education systems — as judged by the OECD — have in common. The underlying factor? It’s largely down to selecting the best graduates to teach and giving them the best training possible.

In top performing countries such as Finland and South Korea entry to teacher training is highly selective, making the profession attractive to the best graduates. To be accepted students typically have to show excellent literacy and numeracy, strong communication skills, a willingness to learn and desire to teach.

Top education systems see improving teaching as the only way to boost student outcomes, according to McKinsey. Teachers are coached in the classroom and expected to learn from each other. Schools cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, and principals devote their time to supporting both teachers and pupils rather than administrating. Schools set high standards for every child, evaluate student performance and intervene when standards aren’t met.

The UK charity Teach First has been applying many of these lessons since 2002. The charity aims to fight educational disadvantage by recruiting top graduates, training them as teachers and placing them in some of the UK’s most challenging schools. Its teachers improve struggling departments according to UK inspectors Ofsted, and over 80% of Teach First teachers are rated either 'outstanding' or 'good'.

Victoria Richley is in the second year of the Teach First programme. She graduated from the University of Newcastle with a degree in English in 2007 and then went to Spain to study Spanish. "I had the intention when I was coming back to the UK that I was going to study law. However when I was away I started to realise I didn't want to work in the corporate world," she said.

Like all Teach First participants, she began with six weeks of intensive training before starting to teach. "Teaching is a profession that's based on reflection and learning from what you do in the classroom," she said. Teach First participants continue to attend seminars and workshops once in the classroom, and are offered extensive evaluation and coaching from tutors.

Competition for places on Teach First is intense, and the workload is huge. "When Teach First recruit people they're looking for things like humility, empathy, and motivation, as well as academic ability," she said. Students finish the first year of the programme with a graduate certificate in education and can then work towards a master's degree.

In Finland, most teachers spend at least five years training and possess a master's degree. Less than 10% of those who apply to be teachers are successful, and along with medicine teaching is the most sought-after profession. In Scotland every teacher is guaranteed a year’s work after graduating, with a lighter timetable to allow for induction and mentoring.

Back at home the Department of Education appears to be copying and pasting from the best international examples — its plan emphasises the importance of selecting the best graduates, providing them with extensive theoretical and practical training and then mentoring new teachers. It says initial training should produce “reflective” teachers, and that schools should cultivate a culture of constant improvement.

But major roadblocks lie ahead. Better teacher training will require more money, but the state's four-year austerity plan envisages a cut in teacher numbers, higher fees for third level students, a charge for PLC students, and cuts to programmes for travellers, adult literacy, community education and more.

"Given the paucity of resources at the moment it's remarkable that initial teacher education is now coming on to the agenda," Dr Jim Gleeson said. "For years and years when there were plenty of resources it was the forgotten part of the whole system a lot of the time."

He said that the proposed induction programme for teachers — which will see new teachers get a more experienced mentor — is still “skeletal”, and pointed to the danger that there will be little connection between initial teacher education and induction. “No matter how good any initial teacher education programme is, unless it’s built on and developed as the graduate goes through his or her professional career, it’s limited,” he said.

The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation welcomed the the one-year increase to the bachelor of education programme for primary teachers, but general secretary Sheila Nunan stressed that it's "impossible to implement the curriculum as planned in overcrowded, under-resourced classes in sub-standard schools." The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland said the plans will have little value to students struggling to keep up in big classes.

But evidence is mixed on how class size effects pupils. In 1998, Eric Hanushek of Stanford University examined 277 different studies on the effects of reducing class size, and found that in almost three quarters of cases it made no difference. A positive effect was found in just 15% of studies, and Hanushek concluded that teacher quality is far more important than class size.

But others say class size is crucial, claiming it leads to better relationships between teachers and students, less need for discipline, and that smaller classes prevent students from slipping through the cracks.

"If you're into more pupil centred teaching and learning, then large classes are a constraint," Gleeson said. "Whereas if you're going to teach in the traditional didactic way— the stand at the board and use the textbook way — I'm not sure class size is a major issue for many students, but for disadvantaged students it certainly is a huge problem."

Though most indicators were positive, the Department of Education's chief inspector reported last month that primary teachers were inadequately prepared for almost one quarter of maths and English lessons observed. Research last year showed that most second class pupils were taught by teachers who described themselves as “not very” or only “somewhat” confident teaching maths to weaker students. Meanwhile, the OECD was set to publish its latest research on the performance of 15 year olds in maths, science and literacy as Village went to print.

"Teacher training needs a shake up in this country, it needs a major overhaul,” recently qualified secondary school teacher Marie Lavin told Village.

Lavin reckons few of her fellow 2009 graduates from NUI Galway found teaching jobs in Ireland. "A lot went to England right after they graduated. Some stuck it out until after Christmas and then they went. I applied for umpteen jobs this summer. I didn't get a reply, never mind an interview."

Presuming the planned reforms go ahead, they will have little impact if few changes are made in existing classrooms and if new teachers are expertly trained but left unemployed.

A group chaired by the Department of Education’s general secretary is overseeing the implementation of its new literacy and numeracy plan. The department is currently accepting public submissions on the document.

Dr Jim Gleeson is a member of the Teaching Council but was speaking in a personal capacity