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A fair way for golfers

For some people golf is the reason for getting up in the mornings. However, most are unaware that it is one of the most damaging forms of tourism. There is no sugar coating it, I’m afraid. In many parts of the world, where resorts boast eighteen heavenly holes, others campaign to stop vast amounts of herbicides, pesticides and contaminated water seeping into the natural environment. In the Far East, farmers fight for compensation after being displaced in the name of the game. And then there is the water issue.

With summer holidays approaching, glossy green golf courses are all over brochures and billboards. Yet last year, in Spain and Portugal, water was being shipped in by containers to supply local people, while sprinklers were still in action to keep the golfers coming.  In Cyprus, water is shipped in from Greece, yet construction on fourteen golf courses continues. These golf courses will suck up approximately 30 million cubic metres (cmc) of water annually, compared to the population’s drinking water needs of 85cmc. The new courses will use desalination plants enabling them to use sea water, but this process requires vast amounts of energy, and still fundamentally provides water to tourists before the people who live there.

And golf tourism is growing. Worldwide it is a €12 billion industry. The International Association of Golf Tour Operators IAGTO, set up in 1997, now represents over a thousand companies.  However, at a recent conference on making golf greener, they were clear about putting money first, stating that businesses “need economic success first, and can then aim for environmental sustainability”.

In Mexico there were fifty golf courses ten years ago, and two hundred today. Manuel Diaz Cabrian of the Mexican Tourist Board also talks about the power of the golf dollar, stating, “In Mexico, golf is very elitist, associated with tourism only, not sport”. In similar emerging and developing countries golf proliferates a form of tourism where tourists are viewed as neo-colonialists rather than welcome guests, creating local dissatisfaction and ensuing negative social impacts.

However, there are organisations out there trying to address these issues. The R&A, based in St.Andrew’s, Scotland, is the sport’s international governing body and has an advisory team committed to creating sustainable courses. They promote the use of grassturf suitable to a local climate, water conservation, and limited use of chemicals. Although still in embryonic stage, you can read more at bestcourseforgolf.org. And the rapidly-growing Golf Environment Organisation, or GEO, (golfenvironment.org) has created an international green golf certification scheme, working closely with the likes of The Ryder Cup and Gleneagles.  Its criteria are not only environmental but also take into consideration social impacts, with clubs like La Pinetina, Italy, Ljunghusen, Sweden, Golfbaan de Rottebergen in The Netherlands, and RJ International in Ipswich, UK boasting GEO certificates in the clubhouse.

One thing that GEO is passionate about is changing the way we perceive golf. A hundred years ago courses were natural, made with heather, bracken, sand, or whatever was indigenous. In Ireland, a good example today is Highfield Golf and Country Club (highfield-golf.ie), created by the Duggan family on their farmland. It was built on natural terrain rather than sand-based greens resulting in minimal invasion of the soil, and little or no chemicals to maintain them. And any unused spaces have been left ‘wild’, allowing the local ecosystem to thrive. Now that’s what I call a ‘fair way’.

 

 

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The Old Milking Parlour, County Wicklow

 

The Old Milking Parlour, County Wicklow

Serendipity is sometimes a life saver. About ten years ago, at one of those crucial life turning points, when I didn’t know which road to take, I got a phone call from a friend, asking me to mind his cottage in the Wicklow Mountains for a few months. Within a week I, my husband and baby, had run to the hills. It was a healing, uplifting and bonding escape for all of us and, for this reason, Wicklow will always be, for me, a place to connect with life and breathe again.

A recent trip back took me further East of the Mountains this time, but the short stay was just enough to whet my Wicklow appetite once more. Only 6kms outside Wicklow Town, I stayed in one of the most stylish eco-friendly houses in Ireland, The Old Milking Parlour in Ballymurrin.

Eco-architects Delphine and Philip Geoghegan, first converted a 17th Century Quaker Meeting House into their home, and then the adjoining stone milking parlour into adesign feat of green gorgeousness for guests. “This was my chance to show people that sustainability is not all about calico and spinach”, Delphine told me.

Bar the cows, the Geoghegans have worked scrupulously to maintain most of the original features. The four elegant wood and glass doors which open onto the daffodil-strewn rear garden fill each of the original cattle entrances. Resisting any temptation to chop the Parlour into separate buildings, they have preserved the original partitions, which provide a semi-open plan aesthetic, with one room merging smoothly into another.

The under-floor geothermal heating creates an almost ‘soft’ warm air, topped up by the roaring designer wood-burning stove, with a flue which stretches up through the pitched timber rafters. As well as this, the energy from solar panels provides the majority of hot water. The Parlour is minimally furnished with pale wood, allowing designer splashes of red or lime green to contrast perfectly with the original dry-stone wall, now painted white with lime and organic paints. Funky designer touches are plenty, from the resplendent shower heads to the energy-saving coloured halogen lights illuminating the porcelain-tiled corridor which links each carefully planned space.

The Parlour is quite simply a place of peace. I recommend leaving the car behind and chilling here for a weekend. You
 can take a train to Wicklow Town and hire a bike at Wicklow Cycles from €10per day. Sadly, you can’t take your bike on commuter trains stopping at Wicklow, en route to Arklow, unless a fold up. But you can take it on certain Inter-city Services, en route to Rosslare, depending on the train in use. Better to hire one, really, as rail-bike service is still unpredictable. Or take Wicklow Bus, and put your bike in the boot, if it’s not too full.

In Wicklow Town you can stock up on the Garden of Ireland’s produce at The Dominican Farm and Ecology Centre, just beside Wicklow Gaol. Its shelves are brimming with organic meat and vegetables, most of which are sourced from the 70 acre farm set up and run by the Dominican Sisters in 1998.

It’s another six walk or cycle from Ballymurrin along country lanes to the sand dunes of Brittas Bay. So, between the train, walks, cycling, food, and the Parlour itself, I can’t think of a better place to welcome Spring, and start breathing in a bit life again.

www.ballymurrin.ie

 

This article, by Catherine Mack, was first published in The Irish Times

 

 

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Natural Retreats, Ireland

Dawn at Parknasilla

The recession has forced many of our golden gates of tourism to open to new ideas and new visitors, indirectly creating a more responsible and accessible form of tourism. I recently visited the five star hotels of Parknasilla in Kerry and Castlemartyr in Cork which have opened their doors to us mere mortals. This is not the work of Nama either, but a company called Natural Retreats (www.naturalretreats.com) which already owns sustainable (and sumptuous) houses in the UK and has, for the last year, been moving into self-catering lodges in the grounds of Ireland’s most exclusive hotels, making them just a little more inclusive.

 

I wrote about this company when it first entered the Irish market ,  impressed by their ethos of developing sustainable tourism in areas of important cultural and natural heritage. Recently, I checked out how they were doing. First stop, Parknasilla, where we thought we might have to go through a separate interlopers’ entrance so that ‘battered old Volvo’ alarms didn’t go off.   But the integration of posh and pleb was done seamlessly and without judgement. We checked in at the same desk as golfers with their Golfs, and Foxrockers with their furs, as they headed to their suites, and we to our self-catering.

The pool at Parknasilla is almost precocious in its beauty

However, it was the outdoors which beckoned at Parknasilla, and is the reason why people have been coming since 1895. There are five hundred acres of woodland and coastal walks here, with tiny islands linked to the hotel by wooden bridges. On an early morning stroll to catch the mist coming up over the many inlets, there was an eerie silence with only the oyster catchers on dawn duty. The beauty here is truly mesmeric.

Guests staying at Natural Retreats’ lodges are given full access to hotel facilities, sharing hot tubs, croquet lawns and extraordinarily beautiful swimming pools with the great washed. The Victorian ‘children should be seen and not heard’ still hovers a little at Parknasilla, being asked to leave the pool at 5pm, only served dinner at certain times,  and a general air of hushed tones around the lounges. The games room is in a separate building and equipment was on last legs. But when the pool shut we just ran down to the Victorian bathing huts on the shore and dived into the Atlantic, letting our screams  echo around the bay, hushed tones long forgotten. The hotel restaurant was beyond our budget anyway, so we ate in from the nearby butchers or out at O’Shea’s pub, with its fab fish pie. Both in nearby Sneem.

At Castlemartyr, the ambience was very different. Although equally luxurious, it had a younger feel to it, with bikes for everyone’s use, the kids were allowed to walk the hotel’s dogs and blind eyes were turned when ‘adult time’  kicked in at the pool when it was quiet. The games room is ‘soooo cool’ with leather sofas, a Wii, snooker table with all the balls and board games with all the bits. We cycled into the village for supplies, picnicked on the lawns and noone blinked an eye.

One disappointment, however, was the welcome hampers which had impressed me so much at Natural Retreats in
Yorkshire, brimming with local produce. Here they were more white sliced loaf and instant coffee. Natural Retreats’ Director, Ewan Kearney reassured me, “We’re working through an ongoing list of improvements at each site, including implementing local produce in the welcome hampers, improving the guest information manuals with things to do and see in the local area, eco-friendly cleaning products and see this as a gradual process that is more likely to succeed if the business is financially stable”.

These are not cheap breaks by any means, but as George Bernard Shaw said of Parknasilla, “This place does not belong to any world that you or I have ever worked in or lived in. It is part of our dream world”. Natural Retreats has brought the dream a bit closer to reality for many and, with sustainability at its core, aims to make the same possible for future generations to come.

 

This article, by Catherine Mack,  was first published in The Irish Times 28 August 2010

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Beware the Burmese bandwagon

‘Working together in unison’ was the recurrent theme of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s message, following her release from house arrest in Burma just a few weeks ago. Words which uplifted so many and yet, in tourism, an industry where the word ‘Burma’ has been divisive to say the least, the idea of unity seems a long way off. Indeed, until recently, only the brave, bold, base or belligerent dared to mention the B-word.

So there should have been a sigh of relief when, just days before she was released, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party declared that a partial ban on tourism be lifted. The proviso is that mass tourism is not the way to go, and that tourists should travel independently, avoiding all ‘juntafied’ businesses such as most of the cruises, coastal resorts and big hotels. Consequently, even Tourism Concern, the leading charity for human rights in tourism, has changed its policy. This is a big turnaround for an organisation which, over the past fifteen years, has worked passionately and energetically to push the Burma boycott, identifying UK and international travel companies contributing to the regime, and petitioned for Lonely Planet to withdraw its Burma guidebook.

Tour operators such as responsibletravel.com are still wary, however, with director, Justin Francis, saying “We are seeking further clarification to the change in policy, which we are concerned may be the opinion of one spokesperson given in a press interview rather than that of Aung San Suu Kyi or NLD official policy”.

However, Burma Action Ireland confirms that Aung San Suu Kyi is supporting this change of policy, following an interview with Der Spiegel newspaper, where she stated that the EU “has spoken out against group tours where Burmese government facilities are used. It endorses individual trips, however, which could benefit private companies” and that “it is essential that people see what is actually happening in this country”. A further interview with Amnesty International supported this when she said, “There’s a lot of enthusiasm on the part of young people which I did not see seven years ago so that is very, very encouraging for us and I would very much like the young people of Burma to be able to communicate with young people abroad, so they can find new ways of helping to bring our struggle to a victorious end ”. As electronic communication is still extremely limited, this suggests that she is indeed welcoming people to physically start coming back to visit.

Unlike the responsibletravel.com’s of this world, however, some tour operators will now quite simply jump on a ‘Burma’s fine’ bandwagon, with dollar signs not human rights at the top of their agendas.  So beware of the press frenzy to discover ‘somewhere new for 2011’ and research a trip carefully.  Personally, when I feel ready to travel there, the companies which ignored the NLD’s earlier request to boycott tourism (a list of these is still available on Tourism Concern’s website) will certainly not be top of my list. In terms of guidebooks, Footprint Travel Guides has decided to have a Burma chapter in its next SE Asia guide, due out October 2011, and is one of a few guidebooks to currently get Tourism Concern’s blessing.

There are changes afoot, however. For example, there is no requirement to change money at the airport any more, which means tourists can avoid providing direct income to the junta at the point of entry. And on an optimistic New Year note, Keith Donald, Chairperson of Burma Action Ireland, when asked if he would now contemplate travelling to Burma, said, “I would travel to Burma now because, if Aung San Suu Kyi says it’s ok to go, it is ok.” Similarly, Tricia Barnett, Director of Tourism Concern added, “I must admit that the idea of it still causes huge anxiety, but actually I realise now that the time to start thinking about it has probably come”. But although times are changing, both are quick to remind me of the unchanged facts: fear is rife in Burma, and there are still 2202 political prisoners awaiting release. And before planning our holidays, the priority should be to maintain support for initiatives which ensure that these people are released and that the fight for democracy continues. In unison.

This article was first published in The Irish Times 1 January 2011