County Council puts cold water on appealing Bray-Greystones seaside course report

Wicklow County Council has actually put cold water on an experts’ report that discovered there are no huge engineering challenges to resuming the popular Bray-Greystones cliff walk.

The 7km seaside path was nearby the regional authority in early 2021 following substantial disintegration on the Greystones side of Bray Head and a rockfall on the Bray side.

A brand-new report, commissioned from RPS seeking advice from engineers by the council, discovered there were “attempted and checked” methods of safeguarding versus additional rockfalls, while seaside disintegration on the Greystones side might be prevented by rerouting part of the walk a couple of metres inland.

The course, which uses sweeping cliffside views throughout the sea from Howth to Wicklow Head, formerly brought in an approximated 350,000 visitors a year and created an approximated yearly regional invest of EUR18.4 million, according to a research study by the financial expert Jim Power.

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In its evaluation of the existing state of the course, undertaken this summertime, the specialists explained the problems as small.

[[ It’s a huge destination – we’ve got to get it resumed Opens in brand-new window]

“The cliff walk fulfills the majority of the requirements of the Walking Trails Criteria for Ireland. Most of the requirements that it does not satisfy are small, such as guaranteeing safe gain access to, site updates, upgrade and preserve info boards and signs, and to make sure a path management strategy with record keeping is created,” it stated, including that therapeutic steps might last 120 years.

Wicklow County Council appears to have actually played down the potential customers of an early resuming. President Emer O’Gorman stated the task “will include protecting financing to finish the needed work, after which a path will be established when considered safe to do so”.

The council has regularly stated it would not resume the walk up until it protected financing from a variety of companies.

Ms O’Gorman stated: “In the meantime, the walk stays closed due to security issues over the instability of the location, which represents a considerable security threat to the general public.”

[[ Closure of Bray-Greystones cliff walk has ‘cost the economy EUR73m’Opens in brand-new window]

She repeated that the council had actually determined an alternative path including strolling along the R761 Windgates roadway towards the top of Bray Head before cutting in to a path to Bray seafront, bypassing the existing cliff walk.

Members of the project group Friends of the Cliff Walk have actually called on Tánaiste and Wicklow TD Simon Harris to assemble a conference of the Cliff Walk Task Force that he set up last February to check out the concerns.

“This conference ought to happen urgently, in our view,” stated the group’s representative Peter Murtagh, a previous Irish Times reporter.

“It should hear, a) that the council accepts the report and b) has actually set a transparent schedule for the fast application of the short-term steps described in the report that would enable the main resuming of the walk. If the council does decline the report and will not execute its suggestions, that must be specified openly, in our view.”