The Kettle's Boyled: On your bike, Paschal Donohoe!

I first met Paschal Donohoe in 2014 when he was appointed Minister for Transport by Enda Kenny, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. He had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, and I knew I would just get one shot at convincing him of the merits of what I had in mind.

I had a good relationship with the previous incumbent, Alan Kelly, a pragmatic politician who favoured actions over endless can-kicking reports, meaning it was easy to work with him. But any change of tenure brings a change of style, and I wanted to build on the work done by Kelly and move my plan forward.

In 2011 I had kicked off a campaign to get Ireland involved in the field of walking and cycling tourism. Back then I spent a lot of my free time walking the long trails that exist overseas, and I was aware of the infrastructural deficit here with regards to this growing tourism and leisure segment. Germany had over 50,000 Km of trails, but Ireland only had about 60Km. We could never attract overseas visitors who liked walking or cycling, not to mention the thousands of Irish people who would use such facilities, if they existed.

I was lucky to have a few big guns in my corner, most notably John Martin, the Boyle man who was the CEO of Waterways Ireland. With John’s support, I had the permission of Waterways Ireland to incorporate Ireland’s unused river and canal navigation towpaths into a proposal to create a national greenway network. Failte Ireland disagreed, they had a policy that saw people doing short walks around one location, and it took a lot of effort to change that attitude, but that’s another story. Right then, what I needed was a Transport Minister to see the logic in my proposals, hence my early meeting with the new appointee.

I needn’t have worried. Two minutes into the summary of my pitch, the Minister raised both hands. ‘I get it,’ he said, ‘that all makes perfect sense and we should do it. Tell me where we should start?’ I knew the Dublin-Athlone route was the easy one, following the Royal Canal to Mullingar and the closed rail line to Athlone. After that, there was enough publicly-owned land between there and Galway to make a cross-country trail feasible. Donohoe stood up to indicate the meeting was over, and he said ‘we’ll do it.’ I have rarely met a politician so decisive, so quick to grasp the core idea in a proposal. In the following years he proved himself one of our brightest, and it is no surprise he was poached away by the World Bank. He will mostly be remembered for his steady hand on our finances, but I will always remember that he gave us the Royal Canal Way, starting a shift to leisure infrastructure that will outlast us all.