Member's statement: Downpatrick and County Down Railway

Member's statement by Mr Colin McGrath on 13 May 2025.

MLA

Mr Colin McGrath

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

13 May 2025

Type

Member's statement

Business

Members' Statements

Heading

Downpatrick and County Down Railway

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4947480

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I will speak about the Downpatrick and County Down Railway, which is a fantastic local project in my constituency run by volunteers who have spent years restoring our railway heritage. They have built something really special. It is educational, is a tourist draw and brings real pride to our area. When the floods hit Downpatrick, however, the railway was the first place into which they came, and a lot of real and serious damage was done. Unfortunately, the level of funding that was made available was nowhere near enough to help undo the damage that the floods caused. The volunteers had put years of work into restoring trains, carriages, tracks and buildings, and it took just a few days of heavy rain to undo that work. The level of funding provided to try to help the volunteers after the floods was not nearly enough for the size and the scale of their project. It was all the more galling for them when they found out that nearly half the money that had been set aside to try to assist businesses and groups was then sent back for Departments to use. That felt like the ultimate slap in the face, because it said to them, "A huge amount of damage was done. We have got some money, but you are not getting it". It is so sad that some mechanism was not made available for use by an organisation undertaking a community-based project that tries to tick so many of the boxes for government: bringing in tourists; trying to tackle social deprivation; and encouraging people to participate in their local community by volunteering to rejuvenate an area of the town that was previously run down and turning it into a cultural tourism destination. When it came to their need, the money was not there. Instead, the volunteers saw it go back to the centre and not be made available to them. That made the volunteers very sad, and it also makes me very sad, because I want to see that part of Downpatrick be rejuvenated. I want to see more footfall in that part of the town, but the project has been set back by a number of years. There are other Department for Communities initiatives to try to lift Downpatrick, and I hope that we might be able to use them to try to lever in some support, especially to try to help those volunteers, who have put in numerous hours of their own time only to see everything literally swept away. I hope that we can continue to help them. Thank you to the volunteers for the work that they do. Hopefully, we can get some finance for them for the future.

453 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:33 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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