Pride expressed at quality of urban greenway

Pride has been expressed at the finished standard of the Cavan Urban Greenway.

Running from Cavan General Hospital to Carrickane and the Loreto Road, work on the greenway was completed last month.

It encompasses a cycleway, walking path, fencing and drainage works.

Senior Area Engineer, Paul Mulligan, said: “We really wanted to produce a greenway to show people ‘this is the standard of what we can do’.”

He paid tribute to Healthy Ireland, the HSE and management at Cavan General, who allowed the greenway to link with the existing Slí Na Sláinte walk at the hospital site.

Although not yet officially opened, the route has already attracted dozens of walkers on a daily basis anxious to make use of the new looped pathway.

It is hoped the urban greenway can be extended to Butlersbridge and onward to the Ulster Canal at Castle Saunderson. Cavan County Council was recently allocated €175,000 for two sections of the Cavan Railway Greenway, from Cavan to Drumully and from Cloverhill to Belturbet.

In addition, €500,000 allocated to Leitrim Council, will help progress the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Greenway from Collooney to Blacklion.

Acting Director of Services for the area, John Donohoe, said the Department had visited the urban greenway recently to carry out an audit of the finished works and they too had been “highly complimentary”.

“This is what we’d like to call a ‘demonstration stretch’,” said Mr Donohoe. “This is what we can do - high quality work, surfacing, fencing, et cetera.”

Tribute was paid to Paul Clarke who supervised the work and Grainne Harte who managed the project through the Part 8 planning process.

Cavan-Belturbet MD chair Cllr Brendan Fay (Ind), said that it was great to see the local authority so positive and added that the sense of enthusiasm was important when a “job is done well”.