United vision offers bright future for Lough Corrib
Lifestyle - A new group, aimed at involving all the stakeholders in Ireland’s second-largest lake, wants to ensure its future biodiversity and maximise its enormous potential in a sustainable way. JUDY MURPHY learns what’s involved.
A lake which has the capacity to become an attraction like England’s famed Lake Windermere or the renowned Italian lake district, is how the founders of a new organisation, Corrib Beo, describe Galway’s most renowned lake, Lough Corrib. And they stress that sustainable tourism is at the heart of their vision for Ireland’s second largest lake and its surrounds.
Lough Corrib covers 55km and 17,000 hectares – but its catchment area is bigger again, and includes Lough Carra, Lough Mask and the drainage area of the River Clare.
The lake stretches from Cong in Mayo to within six kilometres of the City, incorporating some of Connemara’s most glorious scenery. And, as well as being a major scenic and fishing amenity, rich in biodiversity, the Corrib provides drinking water for the city and county.
“It’s a massive, beautiful place but it can seem invisible unless you are directly involved,” says Mícheál Ó Cinneide, one of the driving forces behind Corrib Beo.
According to Denis Goggin of the group, the Corrib is a perfect microcosm of the environmental threat that’s facing the world at large.
It needs to be protected and developed sustainably for future generations – and that’s what Corrib Beo is all about.
The organisation, which will have its first AGM in Galway City on June 12, wants “to create a shared new vision for a living, vibrant Corrib”, that will benefit local communities, the environment and the economy.
It’s early days, but Mícheál, Denis and the other members of Corrib Beo are working to create a coalition of community groups, voluntary bodies and State agencies, all of whom are currently involved with Corrib. The aim is that these groups will join forces to work on creating this vision.
“We are putting a question to people,” explains Denis, and it’s a straightforward one: ‘What do we want the Corrib to be and how can we achieve it?’
For obvious reasons, he adds, “the quality of the water is the starting point, because everything else depends on that”.
Corrib Beo have already organised a conference, which was held in the City’s Commercial Boat Club earlier this month, and attended by major stakeholders.
Mícheál, a former director of the Environmental Protection Agency, who previously worked with the Marine Institute in Galway for nine years, recently returned to live here and has thrown himself wholeheartedly into Corrib Beo.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.