• Home

• Sport

• Farming

• Business

• Advertising

New National Park, on land and sea, is huge step forward

We all know how politicians love spending our money – but we can’t complain about the resources they’ve expended on Kerry’s second national park, Páirc Náisiúnta na Mara. Money well spent is what you call it.

Our new national marine park takes in Conor Pass, sites on the Inch Peninsula, Mount Brandon and the Owenmore River. 

It will cover 70,000 acres of land and sea and will be a haven for biodiversity and archaeological heritage.

Out at sea it will take in Kerry Head Shoals and the waters around the Blasket Islands. Also now within the warm embrace of this new national park will be that ancient gem Sceilg Mhichíl and Derrynane House, park and beach.

There is nothing about this park that isn’t to be welcomed. And it has proved that the political system can be light-footed and creative when it wants to be. Education Minister Norma Foley and all her colleagues deserve to take a bow (It’s only fair that’s said because for the most part all they get is criticism).

So what now?

The National Parks and Wildlife Service has done a great job in running what was seven national parks up to this and there’s no reason to believe they’ll mess it up now. Quite the contrary.

Nevertheless, this eighth park will have particular characteristics considering that much of it is at sea, which is absolutely wonderful. Tragically, solely as a result of human activity, the marine ecosystem is now under very serious threat, including from tiny plastic particles.

This new national marine park can kickstart the process of reversing, completely, the process of destruction occurring in our seas.

It can become a template for innovative environmental protection and renewal and, in time, it can lead to the expansion of the marine national park throughout the entire coastline, North and South. What a gift that would be to ourselves and to future generations.

There is a distinctly ‘feel-good’ aspect to Kerry’s new national park, a project around which all of us can rally. We all know that the torment we have subjected the natural environment to has to stop.

The National Marine Park goes some way to salve our bad conscience, even if we know that a lot more needs to be done.

It is vital now that the National Parks and Wildlife Service communicates to all of us its projects and plans for this new park; what it intends to achieve, how and when? We need to see the benefits to the natural world of what is being done, as it proceeds.

In that way there will be complete public ‘buy in’, something that’ll guarantee support for developments of this scale down the line.

This new National Marine Park is also good business. Kerry will now attract more visitors to experience for themselves the delights of very special areas, on land and sea where man will never again lay a heavy hand.