Irish Examiner View: Greenway could be the way to go

Coordinator of Cork’s Transport Mobility Forum Sandy McGroarty and her mother Mary McGroarty cycling the Waterford Greenway.

The long-delayed Cork to Limerick motorway — the M20 — has been part of Munster’s mythology for almost as long as promises around draining the Shannon have resurfaced with each passing flood. 

In the decades since the M20 was mooted, our world  — and our ideas of our obligations to the environment around us — have changed if not completely then dramatically. 

What might have then been regarded as attractive is no longer seen as such.

Today, as the voices questioning the sustainability of motorways and private car ownership grow louder, it is almost as if two worlds, the past and the future, collide on this as yet unbuilt stretch of motorway. 

One very positive suggestion attempts to assimilate those different worlds by proposing that a greenway be built parallel to the motorway. 

Though very much at the embryonic stage, and though planners may not have even considered the possibility, the idea embraces the past and speaks to the future at the same time. 

A greenway linking Cork and Limerick would be hugely symbolic and mark a commitment to a better, more sustainable future.