The people of Leitrim have had enough. Enough of seeing their land submerged under a blanket of dark, alien, plantation forestry, of seeing neighbouring farms swallowed whole, the blighted areas converging into vast swathes of forest in which there is no life: no birdsong, no flowers, no human voices.
Recent headlines which revealed that Ireland is missing its forestry targets by 75 per cent for the third year in a row caused some alarm. In 2022, the total area of new forestry planted was 2,273 hectares, well shy of its target of 8,000 hectares.
But the truth is that the forestry we have been growing is the wrong kind – and I say this as someone who has restored 12 hectares of Irish Atlantic rainforest on the Beara peninsula.
The State has been incentivising planting of acres and acres of Sitka spruce. Instead of these dark, dank forests of alien trees, where no wildlife or plants can thrive, wild native trees could be planting themselves.
Yes, we need more trees, lots more of them. But to help maintain a functional biosphere, they must be natural forest ecosystems.
Natural habitats are wonderfully efficient at drawing down and retaining vast quantities of atmospheric carbon. But beyond that, they regulate the climate in other ways. If the Amazon were a single-species plantation, rather than a fantastically complex ecosystem composed of millions of interconnected species, it could not, for example, transpire 20 billion tons of water into the atmosphere every single day, providing rainfall to the whole region and contributing to a stable and liveable global climate. The same is true, albeit on a smaller scale, in Ireland.
Planting more deadzone forestry to supposedly make up for other carbon emitting activities misses entirely the bigger picture. There is evidence to suggest that tree monocultures – the term given to the practice of planting a single species in isolation – do not help prevent climate breakdown, and can even worsen it. A report produced for the Department of Agriculture in 2020 suggested that, on balance, plantations actually emit, rather than store, carbon (however, the department claimed that “as forests are replanted after harvesting and as forests mature the projection is that these forests will return to being a sink”).
Much of Ireland’s best farmland is now a green desert, its diversity pushed out
In Leitrim, over 20 per cent of the county is now “forested” – with plantations, not real forests – roughly double the average across the country. Its residents were the first to set up a campaign, Save Leitrim, to oppose the strategy of rampant afforestation, a move that has since been followed in Kerry, Wicklow, and west Cavan. In parts of Leitrim and other areas, a vision is emerging of the future hellscape that some policymakers have in mind for much of the west of Ireland.
A recent report by the government funded, transdisciplinary SeQuester Project suggests that up to 24 per cent of Ireland needs to be planted with trees, to offset projected CO2 and N2O emissions from farming, primarily livestock. (It should be noted that this does not include methane, which accounts for 68 per cent of agricultural greenhouse gases.)
But where will these trees be planted? It will hardly be on the “good” land of Meath, Tipperary, east Galway, or other parts where farming generates high revenues. Inevitably, they will be foisted on more agriculturally marginal areas, mostly on the western side of the country. In this scenario, we can expect commercial forestry in some places to far exceed that 24 per cent, to 50 per cent or even more. The west of Ireland will essentially be required to take the ecological hit, to allow profitable industries elsewhere in the country to continue.
Meanwhile, nature in those agriculturally successful areas is suffering. Take rivers: by 2019, the number in pristine condition nationwide crashed from 500 in the 1980s to only 20, mainly due to agricultural run-off slurry and fertilisers. Last year’s Environmental Protection Agency report found that pollution from human activities remained “unacceptably high”. Our watercourses, once rich ecosystems, are being transformed into open sewers, mere dumping grounds for excess nutrients that kill off most aquatic life.
Much of Ireland’s best farmland is now a green desert, its diversity pushed out to make way for the most productive grass monocultures.
Up to 6,000km of hedgerows – often the last surviving bastions of wildlife in an otherwise ecologically dead landscape – are being ripped out per year to make every inch of land productive. In comparison, the west is generally less hammered: thanks to the lower fertility, it makes less economic sense to get rid of all vestiges of nature. Even here, however, we’re seeing the same destructive processes at play, and the uplands are, without exception, sheep-bared wastes.
We need to start understanding our Earth as a living system
Trying to make the west of Ireland compensate for carbon emissions from elsewhere will do nothing to resolve any of the other issues further east such as catastrophic biodiversity loss, sky-high methane emissions and dying dying watercourses.
There exists a highly successful model that Ireland could follow, had we the societal vision and courage.
By the 1990s, Costa Rican rainforests had reached a low of 20 per cent land cover through clearance for farming – natural forest in Ireland now covers only 1 per cent of the country. The Costa Rican government then decided to do something that might seem radical to us, but is in reality one of the wisest actions possible: farmers were incentivised to allow forests to return in a way that was genuinely attractive to, and embraced by, rural communities. The result? Forest cover has risen back up to almost 60 per cent. The economy has not crumbled. Costa Ricans are not existing in half-starved misery.
We need to start understanding our Earth as a living system. Preventing climate breakdown will be impossible without simultaneously reversing ecological collapse. Ireland could be an island paradise, with vibrant communities living among a diverse weave of wild natural ecosystems, including our own temperate rainforests, healthy rivers, species-rich grasslands, bogs and other wetlands, alongside traditional land uses.
Yesterday evening the Cabinet approved a new €1.3 billion forestry programme, overseen by Minister Pippa Hackett. The plan includes a commitment “to significantly increase the diversity and range of our forests, with the objective of contributing to biodiversity, sustainability and climate change goals.”
However, there are justifiable fears among environmentalists, based on what is already known about the draft forestry plan, that there will be no meaningful change in direction.
Rural Ireland is indeed under severe threat. But not, as some would have you believe, from environmentalism. The real danger comes from those who see no issue in making the whole island an ecological deadzone, just so long as there’s money in it.
Eoghan Daltun is an author and advocate for rewilding