Four years ago, David Heraty was fed up. Standing in his sheep shed, he was exhausted after a hectic lambing season. The wool off his sheep was fetching 50 cent a fleece; a risible price for a textile he knew should be worth up to €10.
The trend was against him. Irish wool prices had been sliding for decades since the 1950s heyday, when wool was considered “gold” and the price a farmer would get for a large flock could pay the year’s grocery bill. Faced with impossible competition from synthetics, wool prices collapsed. By 2020, wool wasn’t just worthless; it was loss-making. Farmers would pile it up in the corner of a field or shed and leave it to rot; others turned their backs on the stuff altogether and kept self-shedding, wool-less breeds instead.
But Heraty (34), who farms outside Westport, had a hunch there was money to be made. In 2014, he spent a year working on a New Zealand sheep farm where an old English breed, the Romney Marsh, was gaining popularity for its meat and fine long wool. For five generations, Heraty’s family had kept hardy black-faced sheep on the Mayo hills – a breed good for meat but useless for wool. But by 2020 he was done: he sold the sheep and cleaned out the pens, ready for a delivery of Romney sheep that he imported from England.
Today, Heraty’s income is up 15 per cent – bucking the national trend for sheep farmers, whose profits have decreased. “I’m getting more money for a different breed, and my financial situation has increased off the back of wool sales,” he says. With four others, he’s set up Emerald Romney sheep breeders’ group to kick-start a rejuvenation in the Irish wool industry to benefit farmers.
“People thought I was mad,” Heraty says while checking his flock, something he does every morning after he drops his young children to school. “But society is pushing a green agenda, and there’s nothing more green than wool. My goal is to produce the best-quality wool possible.”
Heraty’s group recently signed a deal with Ériu, a textile and fashion business set up by Dubliner Zoe Daly and sheep farmer and investor Lionel Mackey, who work with 80 Irish farmers to source 100 per cent Irish wool that is spun at Donegal Yarns and sold as blankets, shawls and yarn. “In the last year, I’ve got calls from different people around Ireland who want to work with wool. Wool is worth something – there is a real opportunity there.”
From 2012 to 2023, Ireland’s sheep population increased by 500,000 to 4.1 million. The sector is focused on meat production, and Ireland is the second-largest exporter in the EU and the fourth-largest worldwide. However, according to the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), the 36,000 sheep farmers are in a low-income “vulnerable” sector and entirely dependent on direct subsidies.
[ Preserving our wool heritageOpens in new window ]
For Heraty, there are untapped markets for Irish wool beyond high-end clothing. Today’s global wool market is worth €31 billion, driven by opportunities in building insulation, curtains and carpets, clothing for firefighters (wool is naturally flame resistant), fertiliser and horticulture. When removed from the wool, lanolin, a fatty substance produced by the sebaceous glands of sheep, is sold into the cosmetics industry and is increasingly used in Asia’s fish farming industry as a feed for shrimp.
Sheep produce greenhouse gas emissions, and there are concerns about the impact of overgrazing – ecologist and author Pádraic Fogarty has called for a “complete destocking” of sheep from deteriorated uplands. Still, wool has sustainability credentials that stand up to scrutiny. It’s renewable, biodegradable, highly insulating and has a long lifespan. It’s breathable, odour-resistant, versatile as a natural material, and can be widely used; it was recently laid in footpaths on mountainous trails in Sligo.
But it can’t match fast fashion’s material of choice: synthetic fibres developed in the 1950s. Lightweight, quick-drying and cheap fabrics suchh as nylon and polyester boomed in popularity. “Washed any way, they stay wash and wear for life ... and give you more value for your money,” promised a 1960s DuPont advert for polyester.
Society is pushing a green agenda, and there’s nothing more green than wool
To make polyester, plastic pellets are melted into thick liquid before being forced through tiny holes to create fibre strands. It’s a bit like making pasta, except the source material is crude oil, a liquid fossil fuel. Today, 72 million tonnes of synthetic fibre are produced every year – two-thirds of total global fibre production. When washed, a synthetic garment can shed up to 2,000 fibres, and according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, half a million tonnes of microfibres end up in our oceans every year from washing clothes. In 2022, microplastics were found in human blood for the first time.
Irish farmers produce roughly seven million kilograms of wool annually, but it’s too coarse and scratchy for clothing. Where farmers bother to sell it, the wool is bought by one of nine merchants in the country. (UK buyers recently acquired two of Ireland’s most prominent wool merchants.) It’s then exported to the UK for washing – Ireland’s wool processing facilities have long shut their doors – and then either sold on the global market for carpets or reimported to Ireland for further manufacturing into pillows, insulation, clothing and other products.
In 2020, the Irish Government committed to exploring new opportunities for farmers to make money from wool to fire up the industry. Last year, the Irish Grown Wool Council was set up as a single voice for the industry. It’s run by 21 volunteer stakeholders, including Heraty. Last month, the Department of Agriculture gave more than €500,000 to Munster Technological University to explore markets for Irish wool. They’re due to report in early 2027.
“The unfairness in the system has allowed fossil fuel-based synthetic fibres to be king and for natural fibres to be siphoned off to the side,” says the Green Party’s Dr Pippa Hackett, a sheep farmer who is Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity in the Department of Agriculture. She adds that there may be opportunities to further support the wool sector through public procurement and VAT reduction measures.
[ Watch: Pippa Hackett - 'I want to bring the whole country with us'Opens in new window ]
“It is an incredible product – natural, low carbon, biodegradable,” she says. “People need to see wool as a material worth investing in.”
Could a wool processing plant be built in Ireland? “If we were washing every kilo of wool produced, it would be something we should look at,” says Kevin Dooley, a wool merchant and member of the Irish Wool Council who produces Irish wool pillows and mattresses. The cost of importing a kilo of washed wool is about €5; to import synthetic fibres from China, he’d pay just 20 cent.
“There are green shoots,” he says. “We need a full-time paid person in the Wool Council to drive it all on, and we need to make wool fully traceable back to the farm.”
A small-scale wool processing plant could be one answer. In Wicklow, former hospital doctor Catherine McCann keeps 37 Romney sheep on her farm. She takes the wool off their backs in June, when they look like “woolly mammoths”, and then removes the dirty wool, which she uses as mulch in her vegetable garden. The clean wool is packed and posted to the Natural Fibre Company, a bespoke, specialist wool processor in Cornwall that caters for small-scale farmers. The wool is sent back to McCann as yarn, which she then sells to Studio Donegal in Kilcar, where it’s spun into products that are ultimately sold in Stable of Ireland in Dublin.
“The big cost is getting my wool to Cornwall. If we had our own processor, it would be cheaper. We were famous for our wool once, but it seems terrible that we don’t have a way of processing wool now,” she says.
However, as the industry develops, sufficient quantities of raw wool will only be available once farmers see a lift in price. “The mindset has to change,” says Adrian Gallagher of the IFA. “Farmers’ opinion is lost, particularly young farmers who don’t see wool as valuable. So, the merchants aren’t getting the volume of wool they could. We need to add value to it and get a price increase on the farm.”
But the future prospects aren’t just about monetary rewards. For Heraty, the feeling of holding a product made from his wool is, he says, “unbelievable”. Last Christmas, he received a thank you package in the post from Daly and Mackey in Ériu for supplying his wool. In it was a hand-woven hat made using Heraty’s wool.
“My four-year-old was with me when we were shearing that wool,” he says. “I put the hat on his head, and he was in awe that he was wearing the wool from our sheep. It was the nicest moment I’ve ever had.”
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