Chapter 1: What is the significance of the newly launched UNESCO Geopark?
This is Countrywide on RTE Radio 1.
Hello, good morning. We are coming to you this morning from beside Astley Falls, just outside Linan on the Galway-Mayo border. If you are an angling fan, this stretch of the Arif River is a mecca for you for salmon and for sea trout. If you're a movie buff, this is where Bull McCabe killed the yank.
If you're a lover of landscape, this ancient one is something of an object of absolute fascination. culture, people, geology and landscape. All ideas contained within the newly created UNESCO, United Nations Geopark, which this is right in the middle of. What is a geopark? What does it mean for the people living here? Will it be a practical support?
Will it bring maybe a few too many tourists to the area? All ideas that we'll be exploring between now and nine. We kick off at the formal opening and dedication of the Geopark earlier on this week in Clonbur. My colleague Trasa Vranach was there and was talking to one of the main movers and shakers behind the Geopark, Trish Walsh.
Okay, a bit of Shandos dancing after this. We're going to play a few tunes and then after that we're going to get you to dance the Siege of Venice here. on the car park to celebrate the Geopark launch. So don't be disappearing now for this. Here we go.
The area in a sense is like a hidden gem and there is that part of you that wants to keep it that way because it's such a beautiful place but at the same time people need to live and survive in this area. We started attracting a lot of geology groups coming to Petersburg so for example American universities were bringing their students for a month of geology.
because they could cover all their geology in about 30 kilometres radius around Petersburg and Joyce country, that they would have to travel the entire continent of the United States. Because our geology here records the closing of the Iapetus Ocean, the ocean that existed before the current Atlantic Ocean, We're talking about millions of years, about 700 million years of geological history.
And some of the early pioneers of plate tectonics, for example, studied in this area. And because they were noticing similarities in the rocks here and in Wales, and the Appalachians in America, they could see that we had once been a giant continent all joined together, which then split apart. So the geology is amazing.
So community activists back in 2008, 2009, we were looking at how do you kind of help the tourism in the area? And we came across the concept of geoparks. And at the time, they were just European geoparks. They then went to global.
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Chapter 2: How does the Geopark support local communities and tourism?
And a lot of people, even locally, still sometimes say to me, what's the Geopark all about? It's a model for rural development, is my easiest way to explain it. It's utilising the natural landscape. the heritage of the area and the buy-in and community spirit that are in places like this. This is what community is all about. It's people and place that creates a Geopark.
Looking to the future then, how do you see that the Geopark will benefit Clonburgh here economically and otherwise and also how do you judge that in the future?
We'll judge it in many ways by the type of visitor we're attracting in. So tourism is a key strategy, but if tourism isn't managed correctly, tourists become more of a hindrance than a help to communities. We're not trying to attract coaches passing through that don't contribute to the local economy.
We want people to come into Clonbur and whether it's staying at Petersburg or any of the other places, the local B&Bs, the local hotel, they're staying for periods of time. They might be learning music, they might be learning the Irish language, they might be learning about geology or the environment.
We have an arborist programme that runs at Petersburg now and it attracts students from all over the country because it's the only programme of its type. And that is bringing people in and the best part about, I call it educational tourism. They're coming in not at the peak periods when we're full already. They're coming in at the shoulder periods and in the winter.
So we're planning for the future.
That's what the impact is going to be. This is now one of five Geoparks in Ireland and it's the first and the only one in the Gaeltacht area. The Irish language, the culture is very important here and important to this Geopark.
It's important that we're speaking it. There's more Irish being spoken in the community now over the last number of years. If we can hold people in areas, then the language stays alive. We're very proud that we're the only Gaeltacht and in fact UNESCO are really interested in this. They looked for additional information in relation to the language.
because we probably don't see it ourselves, but internationally it's critical that languages are preserved. You know, it's the whole history and heritage of people as well. But it's all about people being able to live and work in places that keeps the language alive. And that's what we're trying to do.
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