In April 2024 Fáilte Ireland announced that the Wild Atlantic Way generates €3 billion in annual tourism revenue. Six months later the State quietly removed the legal obligation on local authorities to preserve public rights of way to the seashore.

The two events are not a sequencing accident. They are the same decade of policy. The same coalitions of government. The same legislative pattern. The Irish State has been simultaneously branding and selling the public's customary relationship with the western coast and dismantling the legal mechanism that gave the public access to it. The brochure and the gate.

This is the story of how that happened, who paid for what, who gained what, and what it tells you about how the Irish State now relates to the commons it inherited.

The brand

The Wild Atlantic Way was launched by Fáilte Ireland in 2014, a tourism response to the post-2008 collapse in international visitor numbers. The initial investment was €10 million. The product was a 2,500 kilometre branded touring route running from Kinsale in County Cork to the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal, marketed primarily at the international car-touring segment and at domestic short-break tourism.

By April 2024, ten years in, Fáilte Ireland was reporting that the route generated €3 billion in annual tourism revenue. Tourism on the Wild Atlantic Way had grown by 58% over the decade. 35,000 jobs were attributed to the route. Just over half of all domestic Irish tourism revenue was being generated in the western region the route describes.

By any commercial reading this is a successful tourism initiative. €10 million in seed investment translating into €3 billion in annual revenue is the kind of return that a private-sector marketing operation would frame and hang above the boardroom.

What is worth pausing on is what the brand actually monetised. Not infrastructure. The State did not build the cliffs at Slieve League. The State did not stack the rocks at Downpatrick Head. The State did not cut the harbours at Roundstone or excavate the sea arch at Pollet. The Wild Atlantic Way is a marketing wrapper around landscape assets that already existed, that the public had been walking and fishing and looking at for centuries where they could, and that had no monetary value attached to them until they were brigaded into a marketed touring route.

The brand did require some investment. Signage. Coordinated tourism industry buy-in. A small amount of viewing-platform infrastructure at the official "discovery points" along the route. None of that is in dispute. €10 million captured €3 billion a year in revenue, on assets that cost the State nothing to produce.

The question this piece asks is what kind of relationship the State now has to the assets it monetised, and what kind of relationship the public retains.

The path

Most readers will not know the legal position on access to the Irish countryside, because for most of Irish history that position was governed by custom and forbearance rather than statute. The custom is now thinning out. The statute, where it exists at all, is permissive rather than protective.

There is no general right to roam in Ireland. There is no Irish equivalent of the Scottish Land Reform Act 2003. There is no Irish equivalent of the English Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. Walking on private land in Ireland is, as a default legal matter, trespass. Where access is permitted, it is at the landowner's discretion, can be withdrawn at any time, and creates no enforceable right.

Public rights of way exist in Irish law but are vanishingly rare. They require historical evidence of use to establish, are usually not registered anywhere a member of the public could find them, and have been physically blocked over the past two decades without legal challenge meaningfully succeeding.

The Planning and Development Act 2000 contained a provision that local authorities should "include objectives for the preservation of public rights of way which give access to seashore, mountain, lakeshore, riverbank or other place of natural beauty or recreational utility". The obligation was weak. It was an obligation to include objectives, not an obligation to enforce or even to identify exhaustively. Even at that, the Irish Examiner reported in 2021 that ten councils had no record or map of any public right of way, despite the statutory requirement, and faced no consequence for the omission.

What enforcement was attempted carries its own warning. The Lissadell case stands as the modern marker. In 2008 Sligo County Council voted unanimously, after receiving 40 submissions from local people, to preserve four customary rights of way over the Lissadell Estate in Sligo. The estate's owners, two senior counsel barristers, sued the council. The case ran for years. The Supreme Court eventually ruled for the owners on four routes, with only a small coastal section retaining public access. The total legal cost, by various estimates, exceeded €5 million. No council since has shown enthusiasm for repeating the exercise.

The pattern reaches into the Wild Atlantic Way directly. The Great Pollet Sea Arch on the Fanad peninsula in Donegal is one of the route's listed scenic points. In 2017 visitors arriving at the path leading to the arch found the turnstile blocked with stones and barbed wire, with trespass warning signs added, by the adjacent landowner. There were petitions. There was a "March to the Arch". The legal position, in the end, was straightforward: the landowner was within their rights. Other examples along the 2,500 kilometre route follow the same shape. The State markets the destination. The access is not the State's to give.

This is the gap the brochure does not mention. The reader looking at the Fáilte Ireland map sees a continuous coastal route. The walker arriving at any given point on it discovers that the route is a marketing object, not a legal one.

The streamlining for those who pay

While the public's customary relationship with the foreshore was eroding, the State was busy on a parallel track. The licensing regime for commercial use of the foreshore was being reformed and accelerated.

The Foreshore Act 1933 had governed the use of State-owned foreshore for nine decades. Slow, paper-heavy, criticised as inadequate to the scale of consenting offshore wind would require. Reasonably criticised, on the technical merits.

The Maritime Area Planning Act 2021 replaced large parts of that regime for offshore renewable energy. Maritime Area Consents now run through a streamlined consenting process. Designated Maritime Area Plans establish the spatial framework for where commercial offshore development can occur. The first DMAP for offshore renewable energy was approved by the Oireachtas in 2024.

The driver, in fairness, is real. Ireland has serious decarbonisation commitments. Offshore wind is going to be a major part of how those commitments are met. A consenting regime designed in 1933, before any of this technology existed, was not going to deliver the scale required.

What is worth noting is what did not accompany the streamlining. There is no Public Access Maritime Plan. There is no Designated Walking Area Plan. There is no statutory equivalent process by which a community group can obtain rights of public access to a stretch of foreshore comparable to the process by which a developer can obtain rights of extraction. When commercial actors needed a clearer process on the foreshore, the State delivered one. When the public needed a clearer process on the foreshore, the State did the opposite.

Here is the doing of the opposite.

The October 2024 change

The Planning and Development Act 2024 was sold publicly as a modernisation of Irish planning law, a long-overdue consolidation of statutory provisions accreted over twenty-four years of amendments to the 2000 Act. Much of it is exactly that. The Act runs to several hundred sections and a fair number of them are administrative housekeeping that no reasonable person would object to.

One particular change is not housekeeping. The 2024 Act removed the obligation on local authorities to include in their development plans objectives for the preservation of public rights of way which give access to seashore, mountain, lakeshore, riverbank, cemetery, monument or other places of natural beauty or recreational utility. The 2000 Act's weak but present obligation is gone.

The political defence, where it has been offered, is that the Act streamlines and modernises planning law and that local authority discretion remains intact. The structural reading is harder to avoid. Ten councils, by 2021, had failed to fulfil even the previous obligation. The 2024 change codifies the existing non-enforcement and forecloses future enforcement. A council inclined to defend a public right of way no longer has the statutory hook to do so. A council inclined to ignore one no longer has the statutory irritant to ignore.

The timing is what makes this piece worth writing. In April 2024, six months before the Act passed, Fáilte Ireland reported that the Wild Atlantic Way had generated €3 billion in annual revenue across its first decade. Every "discovery point" on the route is, by definition, a place of natural beauty or recreational utility. Every public path that allows the tourist to reach the cliff or the sea stack or the harbour was, in principle, the kind of right of way the 2000 Act obliged councils to preserve. The 2024 Act removed that obligation in the same year the State announced the route's commercial success.

The State commercialised the brand of the public's relationship with the coast and then legislatively withdrew the obligation that supported the relationship. Both halves were on-the-record acts of the same Government. They are not in tension in any way that the responsible Ministers have been required to address. They sit beside one another in the policy record, as if the contradiction were not visible.

Who paid for what, who got what

There is an accounting underneath all of this and it is worth doing plainly.

Whose contribution to the Wild Atlantic Way's €3 billion in annual revenue is structurally uncompensated:

  • The landscape itself. The State did not create the cliffs, the headlands, the beaches, the islands or the harbours that the brand markets.
  • Centuries of cultural memory and place-meaning, attached to specific points by communities the State did not pay. The names on the map are not Fáilte Ireland's invention.
  • The foot-traffic of generations of walkers, fishermen, naturalists, smugglers and locals who established the routes to the discovery points before the discovery points had a brand attached.
  • The implicit goodwill of landowners who have not blocked access, even though the law gives them complete discretion to do so. Many have been generous, that goodwill has held a great deal of the route open without legal recourse, and that goodwill has been quietly relied upon by the brand without ever being formalised.

Who captures the €3 billion in annual revenue:

  • The hospitality, accommodation and transport sectors along the route. Real jobs, real businesses, much of it locally held. This is genuine economic benefit and it is not the target of this piece.
  • A subset of larger operators, hotel chains, tour bus operators, branded experience operators, who capture a disproportionate share by virtue of scale.
  • The State, through VAT and corporation tax on the above.
  • Fáilte Ireland and the Department of Tourism, in continued budget allocations and political legitimacy.

Whose access to the landscape that produced the €3 billion has been legislatively diminished:

  • Local communities along the route who walked these paths before the brand existed and who increasingly find them blocked.
  • Future tourists, both international and domestic, who will arrive at discovery points and find them inaccessible, with no legal recourse and now no statutory obligation on any council to defend the access.
  • The general Irish public, whose customary relationship with the seashore was a commons in the older sense and is now functionally permissive, held at the discretion of whoever happens to own the land between the public road and the water.

The arrangement is internally consistent. Extract revenue from the brand of the commons, while removing the obligations that the commons imposed on private landowners. The result is that the most successful Irish tourism initiative of the last two decades sits on top of a legal substrate that is actively eroding the relationship the brand sells.

This is not subtle. It is not hidden. It is in the published Fáilte Ireland evaluation, the published text of the 2024 Act, the public record of the 2021 Maritime Area Planning Act and the well-documented case law on Lissadell. Anyone who wants to put these facts beside one another can do so in an afternoon.

The question is why no one in the Government has been asked to do so on the record.

The fix that would not be hard

None of what follows requires breaching EU competence. None of it requires confiscating private land. All of it has international precedent. The reason none of it is happening in Ireland is political, not technical.

Reinstate the right-of-way preservation obligation in any forthcoming Planning Act amendment. The 2000 Act formula was weak but present. Restore it, with consequence-bearing language for council non-compliance.

Require statutory completion of council right-of-way registers within a defined window. This is the cataloguing work. No enforcement teeth required at this stage, just naming what exists. Most councils have not done it because they have not been required to. Require it.

Pass a Wild Atlantic Way Public Access Act. A single targeted piece of legislation creating a statutory right of access to the foreshore along the marketed route. The State is content to brand the route. The State should be willing to legislate the access the brand assumes.

Create a foreshore access procedure mirroring the Maritime Area Planning Act process for developers. A defined statutory pathway by which a community group can obtain a long-term right of public access to a stretch of foreshore. If commercial extractors get a streamlined consenting regime, public access deserves an equivalent.

Reverse the cost-asymmetry that the Lissadell case established. Statutory cost-shielding for councils enforcing public rights of way against private landowners would correct the imbalance. Public-interest litigation in defence of customary access should not be a private fortune-test.

Each of these is a single piece of legislation. Each of them sits within established Irish constitutional and EU constraints. The reasons they have not happened are familiar. There is no political constituency well-organised enough to demand them. The landowner lobby is well-organised enough to oppose them. The Government has, on the available evidence, calculated that the public will not notice the contradiction between the brochure and the gate.

This piece is one small attempt to make the contradiction noticeable.

The brochure and the gate

The Wild Atlantic Way brochure is a beautiful object. The photographs are stunning, the route is real, the €3 billion is real, the 35,000 jobs are real. None of that is the issue. The issue is what the State has been doing in parallel with the brochure: streamlining commercial extraction on the foreshore, codifying the non-enforcement of public access, and removing the statutory mechanism by which the public could claim the relationship to the coast that the brochure sells.

The next time you visit a Wild Atlantic Way discovery point and find a turnstile blocked with stones, you are looking at the policy. Not the failure of the policy. The policy.

This piece is the first in a series on Irish land financialisation. The next pieces examine cuckoo funds and the engineered loopholes in the 2021 stamp duty crackdown, and the citizen-built rewilding economic model the State has refused to pick up. Independent of any party. Sources for every claim available on request.