Madam, - Selective weedkillers have long removed wild flowers from Irish pastures. Now we see the determined effort to remove them from their surviving refuges on roadside and hedgerow.
I believed that hedge cutting was banned in summer, but here in West Cork, hedges and verges have been cut since mid-July. Our lovely, varied, hedgerow trees and bushes are long gone; now the verge-cutters scrape all growth down to soil level, leaving bare banks brown with dying grass and roadside flowers.
Once one could pick blueberries off these banks, and the cuckoo called in Spring. Now nests and birds are gone. Their winter feed of seeds and berries no longer exists, nor cover for any sort of wildlife. The object seems to be to make the Irish countryside look like the manicured grass of municipal parks; the hedge and verge cutters have turned a thing of beauty into an ugly desert, through which it is a misery to walk or drive.
Can nothing be done to halt this official vandalism of a once very beautiful and varied landscape, the Irish hedge and roadside? - Yours, etc.,
DAPHNE D.C. POCHLIN MOULD, Aherla, Co Cork.