Guest blog – A happy Paddy’s Day by Mark Robins

Mark Robins – a more or less full working life in and around nature NGOs and agencies various –  mostly in South West England and especially for the RSPB. Moved to Ireland in 2018 and for a year led the BirdWatch Ireland Conservation & Policy team and is now a freelance natural environment and sustainable & rural development specialist (sort of retired but glad to do interesting things). Twitter: @ByHedge

A chara,

A happy Paddy’s Day all! A big day of celebration each 17^th March, the traditional death date of Patrick, the foremost patron saint of Ireland. A Day celebrated in more countries than any other national festival and maybe a good day to share some actualities when it comes to nature on this Emerald Isle.

Patrick of course banished all snakes from Ireland. Alternatively post-glacial Ireland never had snakes so there was nothing for St. Patrick to banish. Maybe the snakes were a metaphor for the druids, who Patrick is said to have driven out of Ireland when he established Christianity there? Whatever – it’s a good story. Not so for nature here though.

After a working life in nature conservation in the South West of England (green, Atlantic, rural, hills, lots of livestock farming) a few thoughts then from an English man just beginning to feel a tiny bit native in the south west of the Emerald Isle (green, Atlantic, rural, hills, lots of livestock farming)….

I know the state of nature here – at least on land can’t get much worse – 90% of European designated habitats are at inadequate or bad status see this 2019 report to EC . As in most places intensive agriculture is the greatest pressure.  If you are used to nationally important sites being protected, forget it here – a system of Natural Heritage Areas (NHAs) lives in at best a strange limbo land and at worst have no real status.  As for National Parks while the state agency NPWS (see below) say (here ) it’s the policy endorsed by successive governments to ‘abide by the criteria and standards for National Parks as set by the IUCN’ the actuality is ‘they don’t exist in any legal sense, none operates under a management plan, Killarney is subject to an EC complaint due to gross mismanagement, illegal machine turf-cutting and dumping goes on in Glenveagh, Wicklow Mountains is a sheep ranch’ (quote from Padraig Fogarty July 16, 2018 in the Irish Examiner).

Breeding populations of birds like the Curlew have been pushed to the edge of extinction. Various estimates suggest that there were between 3,300 and 12,000 pairs in the 1980s but the current number may be as low as 138 pairs. The Lapwing barely hangs on. The Hen Harrier suffers familiar habitat loss with forestry and windfarm development in its upland terrain piling on the pressure. A familiar list of once-common birds are slipping away..

So much of the once great Irish habitat systems – the biodiversity offer from this Atlantic Isle – the peatlands, the hills, the rivers, and the Atlantic rainforests – are in really poor shape or have gone. The press report the relentlessly bad news –  ‘Water quality in the rivers and lakes is getting worse, with just 20 rivers having “pristine” conditions last year, down from more than 500 in the 1980s’ (Irish Times Dec 10, 2019) – but the response especially from Government has been pathetic or worse. Summing things up at the National Biodiversity Conference (February 2019)  Ireland’s President, Michael D. Higgins said it well ‘If we were coal miners, we would be up to our knees in dead canaries’.  BirdWatch Ireland (see below) declares biodiversity in Ireland ‘is in A&E’, it gets a great headline, but so little traction. 

So, as bad as it gets. For a comprehensive guide to the lost nature of Ireland read Whittled Away by Pádraic Fogarty (@whittledaway). Or find good quality biodiversity recording & mapping via the National Biodiversity Centre .

I can also see a familiar infrastructure of state agencies and nature NGOs but compared to the UK most if not all of these are relatively tiny, poorly funded or on the margins of any real influence. The State Agency National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is tiddly with its annual budget of €11m infamously set in context by  €16.8 million state  support to the greyhound ‘industry’. From the biggest eNGO – BirdWatch Ireland (follow on @BirdsMatter) to the more campaigning Irish Wildlife Trust  (@Irishwildlife) to the Sustainable Water Network  (@swanireland) and the National Trust for Ireland (@AnTaisce) there may be less than 50 workers in the NGOs for nature across the country.  The organisations are there, as are the plans (see: 3rd National Biodiversity Plan) but the actuality is grim.

Understanding why biodiversity here is in such a state needs some effort. It’s not just the relatively small size of the state, or the lack of political engagement (from a centre-right duopoly which has dominated  government here) which frequently sees Ireland in the European Court of Justice for breaches of environmental law. It’s not just the tiny size of the eNGO sector or of the massive counter weight of the farming union – the Irish Farmers’ Association – said to  be Ireland’s single largest lobby group.  Something else is going on and it’s distinct and different.

The cultural studies academic Raymond Williams exploring a historical understanding of emotions, moods and atmospheres coined a useful phrase; ‘structure of feeling’. For me there’s something in this insidious sense of how the natural environment is viewed here and why.

A tough starter for any Englishman is that land-use is a post-colonial issue. Dipping into this, that ‘Cattle is King’ has a deep meaning. C18th & C19th Ireland saw a system of landed estates with many of the English landlords absentee. Middlemen let the land. Rents needed paying and for the tenant-farmer the rearing of cattle was the commercial necessity. Ireland’s part in the modern era became one of providing agricultural produce for the industrial centres of Britain. Livestock were bred for quick export with the compact (or small) grazier farm as its foundation stone. Here’s a great big root into this structure of feeling which is amplified today via a huge connectivity or sympathy for the livestock farmer (many who are struggling with lousy incomes). A kind of structural sympathy that includes a not-so-long-ago deep rural poverty and a form of agriculture (and income from the Common Agricultural Policy) that escaped this. Somewhere in this mix is a strong sense that ‘unproductive land’ can’t be abided. With small farms to the West, larger to the East, beef, sheep and especially dairy, largely for export, dominate. Land and farming hold a very different place in the heart and the mind here with a sense of purpose much more recently established than across much of England at least.

The very concept of the ‘Emerald Isle’, a green Ireland, wraps a kind of comfort blanket around a wider understanding of the state of nature here. The Kerrygold brand known (and loved?) by consumers around the world associates cows and lush green pastures. Not told is that many of these grasslands are now biodiversity deserts. Or check out the huge success of the The Wild Atlantic Way  a tourism brand that is defined by stunning west coast scenery and an authentic experience of life shaped by the unforgiving seas pounding against the edge of Europe. A brand almost hollow of authentic Atlantic nature. Synonymous with much of Irish tourism nature barely gets a look-in here. More systematic is the role of Bord Bia the powerful Irish Food Board. Food and drink is a very big deal to the Irish economy but despite its sustainability mantra (see its brand Origin Green ) its positive effect on restoring Ireland’s biodiversity is very hard to detect.

Somehow, emotions, moods and atmospheres have undermined action for biodiversity here. Ireland’s green potential doesn’t seem to compute.

Right now then the biodiversity crisis in Ireland is about as bad as it gets. Almost all the ingredients for turning things around look tricky at best.  Extraordinary (& bizarrely given the governments track record) in May 2019 the Dáil (principal chamber of the Irish legislature) declared a climate and biodiversity emergency, making Ireland one of the first countries to officially recognise the gravity of these twin crises facing us. Maybe something is stirring? I’m really not sure but the optimist will find good reasons to be cheerful, and here’s a few:

• High Nature Value farming still widely (see HNVfarmingMAP ) in place albeit that much is in poor condition and the HNV farm income may struggle.
• An Atlantic coastal fringe with some fabulous nature and islands (these unique on so many levels) where moves to protect their communities and nature could release something fantastic for biodiversity (a rewilded Wild Atlantic Way?).
• Some stand-out places like the Burren (see video introduction here) where people and place underpin breathtaking landscapes and biodiversity, and importantly where locally-led results-based biodiversity initiatives and innovation around this (see Burren Winterage) seem to be prospering.
• While whats left of intact peatland systems is next to nothing this leaves restoration opportunities on a huge scale – the state agency Bord Na Mona  (current strapline ‘Brown to Green’) owns massive tracts of worked out peat .
• Breakthrough projects using CAP funding via EIPs (European Innovation Partnerships)  to innovate around the farmed environment in key places, systems and on a big scale for some key species – Hen Harrier and the Freshwater Pearl Mussel  
• And of course, a marine territory that extends far beyond the coastline covering an area more than 10 times Ireland’s land mass.

There are big positive options ahead for Ireland’s biodiversity. Come back and see if it really becomes a green island…

Beir bua agus beannacht

  

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