A red herring, in its original sense, was not an argument but a fish – heavily salted, smoked and pungent enough to distract a pack of hounds off a true scent. The phrase cemented itself as a metaphor in 1807, when an English journalist, William Cobbett, accused the British government of laying a false trail to divert public attention from its own failures.
More than two centuries later, the expression has stuck because it describes a familiar manoeuvre: reframing a problem so convincingly that the real cause slips almost entirely from view. In debates over development and nature conservation, red herrings abound. None is more glaring than the question of Dublin’s Brent geese, repeatedly presented as the reason developments for housing and sports facilities in our capital grind to a halt. The headlines shout “Geese vs The People”, as though the visiting birds – not us humans and the inefficient, ineffective planning systems we’ve created – are literally obstructing progress.
The light-bellied Brent geese are legally protected under Irish and EU law. About 90 per cent of its global population that leaves high Arctic Canada chooses Ireland as its destination, and a majority favour Dublin. They arrive in October and feed on eelgrass in intertidal mudflats in the bay and then leave in April. Eelgrass tends to die back in December. Over the years, the geese have adapted to move inland to feed off grass in parks, sports fields, golf courses and other sites close to the bay. Young geese are particularly keen to explore new spaces – a bit like teenagers, they want to leave their parents and find new places to hang out.
We had little idea how important the feeding sites were to geese until 2009, when curiosity got the better of an independent ecologist, Lorraine Benson, who decided to find out. Did the geese depend on particular sites more than others? Benson counted them and ranked the sites by usage, from no importance (zero geese recorded) to critical (sites supporting more than 400 birds, which is about 1 per cent of the Irish migratory population and is of international importance). Saint Anne’s Park in Raheny, Dublin, for example, had one of the highest concentrations of geese, with 1,450 individuals on the fields.
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This data mattered because when Ireland joined the EU, it also signed up to European environmental law, which requires active protection of sites crucial to species survival. The laws are there to keep our most important wildlife healthy and thriving for the future. Unless we actively want a sterilised city, we can’t ignore the threats from development, pollution or habitat loss. With this in mind, abiding by environmental law isn’t the stuff of nods, winks and “sure, we’ll be grand”. It has to actually happen and if it doesn’t, local communities will often use the courts to force the State to step into line.
However, these laws do not ban development – quite the opposite. Done intelligently – taking a rigorous, coherent and science-based approach, balancing human needs with wildlife – development and conservation can coexist. This is reliant on politicians and planners deciding to understand what’s going on.
Instead of building on Benson’s publicly available research, councils, politicians and the National Parks and Wildlife Service drifted. They failed to commission surveys needed to accurately map critical sites. Developers spent millions acquiring land – some of it a high priority for geese – only to face refusals because the planning system lacked a coherent strategy, science or foresight.
A logical approach, meeting our legal obligations through competent planning – to identify high-priority sites, protect them, and allow development elsewhere – would have involved proactive decision-making and, yes, setting certain limits on development. Only by identifying and accepting these limits can we work out how things should proceed.
Politicians and local authorities know which sites are important. However, they have not used the data to inform land-use zoning or planning. If they did this, it would help create a sustainable framework for the needs of all of us, not just geese, in relation to green space. Environmental laws remain under-enforced, so cases continue to tumble through the courts. Meanwhile, those in power stumble on, weakly pointing their fingers at the one thing that has no voice: a medium-sized goose with a high-pitched honk.
Now, in what can only be seen as scrambled panic amid political pressure filtering down, councils have decided, rather last-minute, to commission Brent goose surveys for this winter. This should have happened a decade ago. The tenders don’t appear to be coordinated and across the four Dublin councils, they differ in how the surveys will be conducted. One Brent goose population, which knows no boundaries, but different methodologies. It points to a high likelihood of wasted public money producing non-comparable, scientifically weak data.
The real red herring here is the suggestion that geese are halting development. The true culprit is an inefficient, dysfunctional planning system, wrapped in political convenience, with science-led decision-making left by the wayside. Developers and geese now urgently need the same thing: certainty.
None of this is easy – and solving the housing crisis is of utmost priority – but it is made much harder with avoidance and inaction. Those in power need to look in the mirror, not the mudflats, and remedy their own chronic failures, if Dublin is to sustainably develop without leaving its wildlife behind.
