Keeping up with Waterways Ireland’s corporate publications is a bit of a chore: there doesn’t seem to be any system allowing interested citizens to sign up for alerts, so you have to troll on over to the relevant web page and check for new stuff (I’ll see whether Page2RSS works).
Anyway, I don’t know when the WI Corporate Plan 2011–2013 [PDF] was uploaded, so it may be that everybody has already read it, although it wasn’t approved until October 2011:
This Corporate Plan 2011 – 2013 was approved by the North/South Ministerial Council on 12th October 2011 subject to budgetary considerations by the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Houses of the Oireachtas.
Naturally, I had a look for mentions of the Ulster Canal. It’s still there in Business Objective 2, which includes this:
Progress restoration of the Ulster canal from Upper Lough Erne to Clones.
But what isn’t there is any money (other than small change). Annex B shows these amounts of expenditure:
- 2011: €390,000
- 2012: €140,000
- 2013: €390,000
With an expected total cost of €45,000,000, it seems that there won’t be much progress in the next few years.
Thank goodness.
Irish waterways history 
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