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Last night's May full council meeting at Downpatrick heard Council Chair Cllr Pete Byrne explain that council will ask the National Trust to appear before all councillors to answer questions on their decision not to lease the proposed site of the Mourne Mountains Gateway Project to the council.
Last week, the National Trust refused to grant the council a lease at Thomas’s Quarry, Newcastle in order to facilitate their £44m plans for a gondola ride between Donard Park and the quarry.
Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (NMDDC) chairperson, Pete Byrne informed elected members of the approach in his opening remarks at the 6 May meeting.
Cllr Byrne said: “The news that broke last week on the gondola project, that the National Trust had pulled out…we held an emergency Mourne Gateway Programme Board meeting last Friday (May 2). There was a robust and long discussion on where that leaves us as a council.
“One of those proposals was to call the National Trust in front of the full council to answer questions on the decision to pull out, which will be happening in the near future, but also asking officers to go and engage with the Belfast Region City Deal team to find out what the next steps are for us going forward, so that we are informed in what we can and can't do, and we can inform the public, of what we can and can't do, in terms of trying to keep that money in Newry, Mourne and Down district area.
“How tough that will be, we don’t know until we have another meeting next week"
The Mourne Mountains Gateway project was supported by £30m through the BRCD with the rest from NMDDC including any other costs. When completed the tourist attraction was predicted to gain over 365,000 visitors a year.
The National Trust had cited environmental concerns for the protected lands, which it felt had not been alleviated, saying: “The National Trust believes that the proposed gondola project and visitor centre would risk placing additional pressures on already degraded upland habitats.
“With the known existing recreational and other pressures on the protected areas, as a conservation charity we cannot support a project of this scale that would be inviting substantial visitor numbers into fragile and threatened areas of the Mournes landscape and therefore we will not be considering a lease at Thomas’s Quarry.”
Newry.ie asked the National Trust for comment following last night's meeting but they didn't wish to add anything to the statement they released last week. "our statement from last week still stands for these queries as it provides our position and reasons for the decision to not consider providing a lease." a National Trust spokesperson said.
NMDDC chamber has now heard that a flurry of emergency meetings are to be planned to retain the £30m funding from the BRCD, potentially for an “alternative” project with elected members to pitch their ideas. Already Newry City Councillor Killian Feehan has suggested that the funding could be reallocated to a Newry Canal project.
The chairperson added: “It has been a very disappointing decision for people who have been working on the project. I just want to make it clear from myself and the chair, that the failure or pulling out of that project, doesn’t fall at the feet of the council officers who were carrying through the requests through the Memorandum of Understanding.
"The memorandum of understanding was signed by the trust and the council, and that's exactly what we were working on the programme board, to the letter of that memorandum of understanding. It asked for us to carry out an independent environmental assessment. That is what this council was doing, carrying out an EIA at the request of the [National] Trust, and following the report of the EIA that we would move to lease discussions. That was the position as we were going through the programme board. Unfortunately, the National Trust has pulled out before that EIA is in front of us. That's the facts of the situation."
Cllr Byrne continued "We are trying our best to get more information from the BRCD panel. It is not in our hands to decide what to do with that funding. It is in the hands of the members of the BRCD panel and we know during that discussion that there are six council areas, and five of those council areas had drawn down money from the tourism, regeneration pillar. Our council obviously had two projects in that, one of the Councils had no projects in it. It was a very competitive process. Inflationary costs have risen in all the projects. So it's going to be a difficult process, but we, and I know Conor [Mallon, Council Director] had said at that meeting, we will do absolutely everything we can to try and retain that money within our district, and I would ask and anybody that has ideas, putting forward alternatives or putting forward requests that they would contact the senior management, whether it's Marie [Ward, Council CEO] or Conor, and put that information in front of them,
"I know a number of external groups like Mountaineering Ireland have put alternatives in front of the senior management team here, while they're having discussions with the BRCD panel and seeing what may or may not be possible. It's important that we get all that information in front of them.
During the council meeting, Mournes Alliance rep, Jill Truesdale brought forward a motion seeking a full review of the gondola project.
The matter was sent to the Mourne Gateway Programme Board for discussion before it will be debated at the council’s Strategy, Policy and Resources committee and sent to full council to be ratified.
