Walking in the Irish countryside: landowner preferences and attitudes to improved public access provision

Abstract

This paper explores the attitudes of landowners across Ireland to the wider provision of public access for recreational walking using a multinomial logit model. The study also investigates the level of compensation required to improve the supply of this public good. Results indicate that 51% of landowners are not willing to provide access (non-providers), 21% are willing to provide access free of charge (free providers) and 28% seek compensation (willing providers). The findings indicate that participation by landowners in a proposed public access scheme is influenced by landowners' experience with walkers, farm type, farm insurance costs, household demographics, regional variations, opportunity cost of land and participation in other agri-environment schemes. Mean willingness-to-accept for landowners willing to facilitate improved public access for walking was found to be €0.27 per metre of walkway.

Keywords:

• public access
• recreation
• walking
• landowners
• willingness-to-accept

Acknowledgements

This paper was written as part of a Rural Stimulus Funded project, financed by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Notes

 1. Keep Ireland Open is a national voluntary organisation campaigning for the right of recreational users to access to the Irish countryside. They are seeking clearly marked legal rights of way, mainly in the lowlands and legal rights to allow freedom to roam in more remote and upland areas.

 2. Teagasc – the Agriculture and Food Development Authority – is a national semi state body providing integrated research, advisory and training services to the agriculture and food industry and rural communities. It was established in September 1988 under the Agriculture (Research, Training and Advice) Act, 1988.

 3. The weights used to make the NFS representative of the Irish farming population are based on the sample number of farms and the population number of farms (from the Census of Agriculture Central Statistics Office 2000) in each farm system and farm size category. The sample number of observations by size/system is simply divided by the population number of observations by size/system to get the weights that make the sample representative of the actual farming population. The method of classifying farms into farming systems, used in the NFS is based on the EU FADN typology set out in the Commission Decision 78/463.

 4. Landowners who are not willing to participate in a public access walking scheme are hereafter defined as ‘non-providers’.

 5. Landowners who are willing to take up a public access scheme for free are defined as ‘free providers’.

 6. Landowners who are willing to join a public access scheme provided they are compensated for it are defined as ‘willing providers’.

 7. The Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) was introduced in Ireland under EU Council Regulation 2078/92 in order to encourage farmers to carry out their activities in a more extensive and environmentally friendly manner.

 8. The single farm payment is a decoupled payment based on the number of livestock premium claims made in the historical three-year reference period from 2000–2002.

 9. The difference between parameter estimates in columns (1) and (2) can provide inference on differences between free providers and willing providers.

10. The midlands region includes the following counties: Laois, Longford, Offaly and Westmeath.

11. The west region includes the following counties: Galway, Mayo and Roscommon.

12. The south-west region includes the following counties: Cork and Kerry.

13. Commonage refers to land on which two or more farmers have grazing rights (Lafferty et al. 1999). Under common law, land held in commonage is seen as a tenancy in common. Each tenant holds an undivided share in the property and has a distinct and separate interest in the property. The ownership is divided into notional shares, rather like shares in a company. Commonage is not physically divided so no one person owns any particular part of the property. In a sense it is communally owned and operated and third parties must treat the co-owners as a single unit for transactions in respect of the land (Pearce and Mee 2000).