Ireland is notorious in Europe for enacting laws and regulations without providing resources

The passing of the Nature Restoration Law by the European Council of Ministers in June this year was the starting gun for each member state to make a significant effort to restore nature across the Continent. Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan said “we are in a biodiversity emergency. The Nature Restoration Law will bring unprecedented action and investment to this challenge, and not a minute too soon.”
It remains to be seen what form this “unprecedented action and investment” will take. He followed his comment by saying “our focus now turns to the development of Ireland’s Nature Restoration Plan”. If the Government is going to spend the next two years preparing a national Nature Restoration Plan then the timescale to achieve this binding target is reduced to four years. Restoration needs to begin immediately on a landscape scale.
Ireland is notorious in Europe for enacting laws and regulations without providing the resources and, most importantly, the political effort to implement them. We know what the best techniques are and we know what restoration is needed because the work is already under way in a number of key parts of the landscape. The immediate need is not for new plans and strategies which do not solve the problem by themselves.
We need a commitment of significant and sustained finance for public bodies such as Bord na Móna, Coillte Nature and the National Parks and Wildlife Service to ramp up their existing work in the field. This can be used to employ and train large numbers of skilled workers that are desperately needed to undertake practical work such as rewetting bogs, converting conifer plantations to mixed woodlands, removing barriers in rivers and planting trees and hedges on farmland.
The fragments of native woodland that remain in the country are mostly infested with invasive plants such as rhododendron which will cost millions of euro to remove permanently. Each of these woody shrubs must be cut by hand and the stumps treated so that they do not regrow. This is time consuming and labour intensive work but is already under way in some areas such as the national parks and Coillte lands.
There is already a national strategy in place to control the invasive deer population that is largely preventing the natural regeneration of mixed woodland. It needs finance and many more trained staff to ramp up the action immediately.
Many voluntary organisations are already doing practical work to restore habitats and species. BirdWatch Ireland manages a number of sites for birds such as waders and seabirds where intensive habitat management and predator exclusion are used to make these areas safe places for nesting. The results can be spectacular, as at Kilcoole on the Wicklow coast, where BirdWatch Ireland and the NPWS has managed to significantly increase the breeding success of the threatened little tern, and waders such as lapwings.
There is a project aiming to restore the native oyster to Dublin Bay, run by University College Dublin in collaboration with Watermark Coffee, to restore these long-lost shellfish to their natural habitats.
Several charismatic bird species such as red kite and white-tailed eagle have been successfully restored to this country over the last 20 years by the Golden Eagle Trust with support from the NPWS, paving the way for restoring other lost species in the future. Such projects could be replicated all around the country if sufficient finance and trained staff were available.
There are also many private landowners undertaking nature restoration on their own initiative and often at their own expense. These include planting of native trees to restore small woodlands, creation of species-rich meadows for pollinators and digging of ponds to help aquatic wildlife.
To date over 7,200 hectares of native woodland have been grant-aided under the Native Woodland Scheme. Tree planting needs to be greatly increased to help restore our native broadleaf woods. Many landowners, local authorities and communities are implementing the all-Ireland pollinator plan which involves restoring flower-rich meadows, field boundaries and parkland to help declining species of bees, butterflies and other insects and thus the natural diversity of the countryside. If the land and the finance was available many more landowners would be encouraged to follow suit.
Exciting though these projects are they represent just the first lap in a long race to restore nature in a country that is among the most highly modified in Europe. The challenge now is to train the thousands of people that will be needed to undertake the restoration work on the ground. It is time to get the boots on and get on with the work itself. It should not be necessary to spend two years drafting a plan for urgent action that must be completed six years from now. The restoration work, already under way, needs to be scaled up immediately with a substantial injection of government funding. This would be an investment in Ireland’s future and it is already long overdue.
Richard Nairn is an ecologist whose latest book Future Wild: Nature Restoration in Ireland will be published on October 1st by New Island Books