I’ve just been to the west of Ireland, perhaps the greenest place I have ever seen, and one of the most comprehensively stripped of nature too. Driving north from Shannon, you pass mile after mile of luminous green, almost treeless fields, until the road rises onto the dramatic limestone of the Burren. We were there to celebrate the marriage of my step-nephew (if such a thing exists) Isaac Ferry to beautiful conservationist Elizabeth Quartararo. The ceremony took place high above the Atlantic, at an ethereal spot beloved of Isaac’s late mother, my sister-in-law Lucy Birley. We reached the top on foot through an ancient hillside wood behind Mount Vernon, where Lady Gregory once entertained Yeats. In summer, Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean flowers grow in a riot amid the cracked limestone.
The following morning, hazy after an evening of oysters, lobsters, pints of Guinness, a roaring fire and happy-sad Irish folk music at Linnane’s pub, we searched for starfish and crabs along the Flaggy Shore, so beloved of Seamus Heaney. I understand now why people flock to the beautiful west of Ireland. And at the same time, I recall Aldo Leopold’s mournful words: ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’
Now who am I, an English visitor, to comment on nature in Ireland, when my country brought such suffering to its people and extracted so much of its forest? My mother’s forebears, the Stewarts, later Viscounts Castlereagh and Marquesses of Londonderry, came over as Scottish planters in the Plantation of Ulster and were pillars of the Ascendancy for three centuries. Lord Castlereagh helped crush the rebellion of 1798 and drove through the Act of Union that abolished the Irish parliament. His half-brother, the 3rd Marquess and my direct ancestor, was an unyielding landlord during the famine. The 6th and 7th Marquesses fought Home Rule, one as lord lieutenant of Ireland, the other in Northern Ireland’s first government. An Englishman today with that inheritance, hectoring the Irish about their land, should tread carefully.
Nevertheless, I have spent my life working for the recovery of nature, and I can’t help myself. For all the picture-postcards, Ireland is among the most nature-depleted countries in the world (Britain isn’t far behind). Even its own Environmental Protection Agency rates its environment as poor. Irish author and rewilder Eoghan Daltun says Ireland ‘coasts on its reputation as the Emerald Isle’; but the green is, to those who don’t know nature, an illusion.
Perhaps four-fifths of Ireland was once wooded. In the west it was Atlantic temperate (or Celtic) rainforest, an astonishingly rich habitat now all but vanished from Europe’s western fringes. What makes it a rainforest is how wet it is. The mild damp weather coming off the Atlantic enables plants to grow on other plants, so-called epiphytes. The surviving pocket of rainforest at Mount Vernon is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever seen; shafts of sunlight piercing the gnarly oak, birch, holly, hazel and rowan, every bough and boulder draped in vivid mosses, lichens, liverworts and ferns.
Farmers began clearing the trees six millennia ago, but the final blow came with the Tudor and Cromwellian conquests, when the last great woods were felled for ships, staves and charcoal, and to deny cover to Irish rebels. By 1900 barely one percent of Ireland was wooded. An anonymous eighteenth-century poet, in the lament Cill Chais (‘Kilcash’), mourned the felling of the great woods of Tipperary: ‘What shall we do now without timber? The last of the woods is laid low.’ The bogs fared no better, milled for power stations or drained and planted with conifers.
The animals went with the woods and the bogs. First the lynx and the European brown bear, then the wild boar and wildcat. The wolf held on longest. Ireland was once known as ‘wolf-land’, until Cromwell put a £6 bounty on every female wolf, and the last was shot in County Carlow in 1786.
Even the Burren, whose flower-rich grasslands are rightly cherished, was once a far richer mosaic. Pollen in its peat shows pine and hazel woods on its hills until Iron Age farmers cleared them around 500 BC, and the thin soil washed away into the cracks.
More astonishing even than the near-total erasure of wild nature is that a century after independence, in one of the world’s richest countries, almost none of it is being allowed to recover. Three powerful industries are doing their utmost to ensure it stays that way: dairy, sheep and state forestry.
Ireland’s lowlands, above all in the south, are now given over to dairy. Since EU milk quotas ended in 2015, the herd has expanded relentlessly. Hedges have been grubbed out, field trees tidied away, wet corners drained, meadows reseeded with ryegrass and dosed with nitrogen. The result is archetypal green concrete to the horizon, as devoid of wildflowers, insects and birds as a car park. The monocrop grass is cut for silage during the May breeding season, macerating hares, frogs and nesting birds. And the slurry from the dairy farms runs into the rivers, choking them with algae. The curlew, whose bubbling call once rang over every Irish bog, has declined by 98 per cent since the 1980s. Yeats begged it to ‘cry no more in the air’, and it has all but obliged. The rasp of the corncrake survives only in a few remote corners. Yeats’s ‘bee-loud glade’ of Innisfree, its evening ‘full of the linnet’s wings’, in a poem I spotted framed on a bathroom wall at Mount Vernon, was simply the ordinary countryside of his day, one which no longer exists.
In the hills, it is sheep. In the 1980s and 1990s, EU headage payments saw ewes piled onto the western hills until whole mountainsides were stripped bare. Numbers have fallen, but the grazing is still relentless. Walking up Abbey Hill and Eagle’s Rock, I saw hawthorn, hazel, holly and gorse trying to reclaim the rocky ground, every sapling nibbled to a stunted bonsai. As in England, most of these hill farms make little or no money; subsidies account for nine-tenths of the average sheep farm’s income. The rainforest is trying to return, but taxpayer-funded sheep ensure that it doesn’t.
One of my heroes, conservationist and writer Pádraic Fogarty, charts the whole sorry story in Whittled Away. He sums up the state’s approach to nature in four words: ‘designation, procrastination, fulmination, compensation’. Sites are protected on paper, farmers get outraged, so the state pays them off, and nothing changes. Even Killarney, Ireland’s oldest national park, has in his judgement ‘ceased to be a functioning ecosystem’, its ancient oakwoods choked by invasive rhododendron and browsed bare by introduced sika deer and feral goats.
A wedding guest said at Linnane’s ‘but we saw lots of trees driving here from Dublin’. Tree cover has crept back to around 11 per cent, but most of it is non-native conifer, above all American Sitka spruce, planted in dark artless blocks on hills and drained bog, much of it by the state forester, Coillte. These plantations are dark, silent wildlife deserts, yet they count in official statistics and many mistake them for actual woodland.
Nor are things any better under the waves. Wild salmon returning to Irish rivers have fallen by a whopping 80 per cent in one human lifetime. Offshore, giant trawlers, many of them foreign, work Irish waters relentlessly, hoovering up marine wildlife and devastating the seabed. The angel shark, once so common in Tralee Bay that anglers tagged dozens a year, is all but gone.
Most Irish farmers, like British ones, are decent, hardworking people doing what the system pays them to do. Ireland’s farm lobby is among Europe’s most formidable, and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is pouring €9.8 billion (£8.2bn) into Irish farms between 2023 and 2027, most of it for keeping land in ‘good agricultural condition’, which means keeping out any pesky scrub, trees or water. A new scheme, Acres, does pay some 50,000 farmers for some nature-friendly work, but it does not go nearly far enough, yet.
Compare Sri Lanka, another island brutalised by the colonial British, roughly the size of the Republic of Ireland, with four times the people and a fraction of the income. A third of it is still forested, home to several thousand wild elephants and a thousand leopards! Part of the reason may be its Buddhist reverence for all living things; Mihintale was declared a wildlife sanctuary in the third century BC. But Ireland had a similar reverence’ for nature. Its Brehon laws ranked oak, hazel and holly among the ‘nobles of the wood” and penalised anyone who felled them, the mad king Sweeney of the medieval Buile Shuibhne lives among the trees praising them one by one. Something must have broken. Perhaps a people dispossessed and starved off their land for centuries came to see land as something to be won back and worked. If so, it’s a reflex that no longer serves Ireland.
In 2009 another hero of mine, Eoghan Daltun, bought a 73-acre farm on the Beara peninsula in West Cork, its scraps of woodland grazed to the bone. He fenced out the grazing animals, pulled out the invaders and sat back. Within a few years the land erupted in oak, holly, birch and rowan seedlings, wildflowers carpeting bare ground, the air pulsing with birdsong. In his bestseller An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, Eoghan argues that only when farmers are paid to restore rainforest will it come back.
Costa Rica did just that. Cattle ranching had left it barely a quarter forested by the 1980s. Since 1997 landowners have been paid to keep and restore forest, which now covers well over half the country and underpins a booming nature-based economy.
Such work has tentatively begun in Ireland. Hometree, a charity founded by surfers in nearby Ennistymon, plans to restore rainforest across 4,000 acres from West Cork to Donegal, partly by paying neighbouring farmers. The Burren Programme has long shown that farmers manage land beautifully for nature given the right incentives. Where nature gets a chance, it returns fast. Golden eagles are back in Donegal, sea eagles in Kerry and red kites in Wicklow. Bord na Móna has stopped milling the midland bogs and rehabilitated some 20,000 hectares, and Coillte is felling spruce on 2,100 hectares of blanket bog. In 2021 cranes bred in Ireland for the first time in centuries, on a rewetted Offaly bog.
Isaac and Elizabeth married in dazzling sunlight above the Flaggy Shore and the glimmering bay of Galway beyond, amid a pocket of Irish rainforest, the old haunt of leprechauns, the púca and the sídhe, whose stories Lady Gregory and Yeats once gathered in these hills. Imagine such places throughout the west, a great mosaic of rainforest, bog, scrub, wildflower meadow and wetland. It wouldn’t be hard to bring it back. All that’s missing is societal will. Ireland is rich; it could redirect a modest share of its lavish farm subsidies to pay farmers, properly and for the long term, to let nature return, and treat its last native woods as the national treasures they are. An English occasional visitor, of all people, has no business telling Ireland what to do with its land. But, and I’m sorry, why on earth not?
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