Multicasting is the simultaneous transmission of data to multiple destinations. In multicast ATM networks the effect of failures on transmission links or nodes can be catastrophic so that the issue of survivability is of great importance. However little attention has been paid to the problem of multicast restoration. This paper presents an efficient heuristic technique for routing backup virtual paths in ulticast networks with link failure. Genetic algorithm is employed here as a heuristic. In the application of genetic algorithm to the problem, a new genetic encoding and decoding method and genetic operators are proposed in this paper. The other several heuristics are also presented in order to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is a promising approach to solving the problem.