Lottery funds resolve Giant’s Causeway wrangle

A long running political wrangle over a planned visitor centre for the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland’s best-known tourist attraction, has been resolved with UK lottery funding.

The Heritage Lottery Fund on Friday announced it would provide £3m towards the £18m overall cost of the visitor centre. The National Trust has allocated £4m, with an application for another £9m lodged with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board.

The Giant’s Causeway is a spectacular deposit of hexagonal basalt columns, so named because of the legend that Finn McCool, the giant of Ulster mythology, had it built so he could woo a giantess on Staffa island in the Hebrides.

But the province’s most important site, which attracts 500,000 tourists a year, has had no permanent visitor centre since May 2000, when fire destroyed it.

Moyle district council, as owner of the site for the centre above the cliffs overlooking the Causeway, invited tenders to develop the area back in 2002.

Part of the problem was that Moyle, which boasts that it is the UK’s smallest council, did not have the capacity to raise the money for the new centre.

However, the politicians were unable to choose between the two rival proposals: one from Seymour Sweeney, a local businessman; and one from the National Trust, which owns the Causeway site itself. By 2007 there was still no decision.

Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionists, the then environment minister, had said she was “minded” to support Mr Sweeney’s bid. However, the decision was later reversed in the wake of reports of Mr Sweeney’s close links with the DUP. It emerged he was a party member and had signed nomination papers for one of its Moyle councillors.

Ian Paisley junior, son of the then party leader, had also bought a holiday home near Bushmills, County Antrim, from Mr Sweeney.

When Sammy Wilson, Ms Foster’s successor at environment, decided to go with the National Trust plan, Mr Sweeney sought a judicial review of the planning decision.

That was only dropped last May. The decision to award lottery funding should now bring a close to the delays hanging over what is one of Northern Ireland’s five signature projects – alongside the Mourne mountains, Belfast‘s Titanic quarter, various sites linked to St Patrick and Londonderry’s walled city.

The “discovery” of the Causeway was announced in a paper to the Royal Society in 1693. At the time there was a furious debate over whether the strange rock feature had been created by men with picks and chisels, by nature, or the efforts of the legendary giant.

Scientists now agree that the naturally formed patterns of rock were formed 65m years ago by volcanic activity.