Irish Examiner view: Plan for new Dursey cable car and visitor centre is good news

Let us hope that the whole experience does not lose the very qualities which make it so distinctive

An Bord Pleanála has given the green light for a new cable car to replace the one opened by Jack Lynch in 1969 and which will be supported by a new visitor centre.

The existing cable car trip over Dursey Sound on the Beara Peninsula contains just enough of an old-fashioned frisson to set it apart from many similar journeys around the world.

There is a moment of delicious, time-travelling thrill as you clamber in, fasten the doors, and bounce and jolt your way across to Dursey Island with wild Atlantic water crashing around some 50m below, visible through the floorboards.

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It’s a pulse-quickening few minutes on a par with landing at Skellig Michael, or the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, or climbing up to Synge’s Chair on Inishmaan on the Aran
Islands or, further afield, walking across Pont du Gard, in the days when you were allowed to do that.

It is good news that An Bord Pleanála has given the green light for a new cable car to replace the one opened by Jack Lynch in 1969 and that this will be supported by a new visitor centre.

But let us hope that the whole experience does not become too homogenised and lose the very qualities which make it so distinctive.