Eoghan Daltun: Irish nature is wrecked — we need a plan to bring back what we’ve lost

The reasons are many, but by far and away the main one is how we use land. Travel across Ireland, and you’ll see little other than great expanses of fields with cows or sheep, and monoculture plantations of non-native trees such as Sitka spruce. Those green fields are mostly virtual monocultures too, of perennial ryegrass in the lowlands, and purple moor-grass in the hills and mountains. Further, many of these places are regularly drenched in slurry and chemicals, such as fertilisers and a whole host of other artificial inputs. When these wash off in the rain, as they inevitably do, they pollute streams, rivers, lakes, and the sea, killing life.

Essentially, we have turned almost the whole of Ireland into one big farm, and nature has paid an exorbitant price. And here’s the thing: all this destruction is funded by the taxpayer through subsidies, to the tune of billions of euro every year.

I could go on, but won’t, because the point I want to make here is another: blaming farmers is not only wrong, it gets us absolutely nowhere. The land is their livelihood, and for decades they’ve been told by all the bodies who they might look to for direction — governments, the Dept. of Agriculture, Teagasc, the IFA and other farm representative organisations — to expand, maximise production, ‘modernise’. And so most farmers have done just what was being asked of them, increasing their herds, building ever bigger slatted units, buying ever bigger tractors and other hugely expensive machinery. To allow all this, many have gone into deep debt, borrowing enormous sums to invest in their farms on the basis that handsome future returns will pay off the loans and interest.

That direction of travel is now hitting a concrete wall, or rather multiple walls, head on. The incessant rain Ireland experienced over the last year is a hint of what’s coming. Because it turns out that nature isn’t just nice to spend time in: wild natural ecosystems are the very basis of a stable, habitable planet. A planet on which agriculture is a realistic possibility. By replacing nature with farmed monocultures, we have been rapidly eroding that capacity, furiously sawing off the very branch on which we all sit. It makes no difference whether we’re talking about somewhere far away like the Amazon, where that’s playing out now, or here in Ireland, where it has taken centuries or more to remove our natural habitats. The Earth is a single unit, and just as greenhouse gas emissions produced in Tajikistan have the same effect as those in Templemore, by annihilating nature anywhere we kill off the very thing that makes civilisation possible in the first place.

We need to be very clear here: the first sector in line to be devastated by climate breakdown is farming. Because more than anything else, agriculture requires a stable climate. Try farming when you get two months of drought followed by another nine or 10 of non-stop rain, as farmers across the country are already starting to discover. And we’ve seen nothing yet, compared to what will come if we don’t change our ways, radically. Yet farmers are being told that their enemies are environmentalists: the very ones who are doing most to try to head off the looming disaster. Farmers understandably feel under attack, that they are being held responsible, for working in ways that only recently were being relentlessly pushed on them.

This situation isn’t ordinary farmers’ fault or problem: it’s the fault and problem of society as a whole. Any other way of viewing it is both unfair and, worse, has no hope of resolving our predicament. Hence, we need to come together, all of us, and inclusively work out how we fix this. It can be done, but only if the farming community genuinely accepts how very real climate and ecological collapse are, and the effects all this will have on their futures. They also need to acknowledge that it’s not good enough to say ‘This is my land, I’ll do what I want’, or ‘We’re the only experts here, stay out of this’. The rest of society subsidises farming, and for that reason alone must have a say in how it’s conducted. But more than that, everyone will be ‘up the Swannee’ if we don’t sort this out, and fast.

By the same token, the rest of society, including the environmental community, must be realistic and fair about what it will take for farmers to change direction, and the support required — above all financial — for them to do so. We need to remember that massive New Holland T7 may very well not be owned at all by the farmer sitting in its cab, but bought with borrowed money, and if he or she doesn’t keep up payments on that and other loans, risks losing the farm handed on by the generations that went before. Farming is an extremely tough business to be in, with insanely hard work, long hours, no days off, unpredictable income based on constantly shifting vagaries of weather, prices of what they both buy and sell, and supermarket below-cost selling. And they suffer all this to produce the food we eat.

Irish farming needs a Marshall Plan that will allow us to bring back the nature we’ve lost through more nature-friendly practices and, above all, rewilding.

Doing so won’t only benefit farmers, nature, the climate, and society at large: it’s utterly essential to a liveable future for everyone.

— Anja Murray is away