[title reference] My entrepreneurial pal D has been cybersquatting on wildatlanticwhiskey.ie for a few years now. He is not alone in cashing in on Bord Failte’s conjuring of The Wild Atlantic Way to drive dollar tourists to the bleak and depopulated West coast of Ireland. See what ventures will autocomplete when you google “Wild Atlantic . . .”.
Every Friday morning, Teagasc hosts Signposts: a live webinar on a range of topics of interest to farmers. Introducing each session is a nice job if you can get it; and at least two govt-payroll employees claim a couple of contact hours to service the scheme each week. Somehow there is zero-redundancy in adolescent mental health or RSA driving testers or nursing home beds or [insert useful / essential public service niche here].
On 6th September Signposts gave a platform to Ray Ó Foghlú and Jeremy Turkington [no prizes for guess which chap is a protestant from Tyrone], from HomeTree.ie, a nature restoration and biodiversity boosting charity from Ennistymon, Co Clare. Turkington was recently recruited from down the road at Irish Seed Savers in Scarriff, where he was tree manager for 5 years. HomeTree have acquired some hectares; but their business model is to work with land-holders rather than displace them. One of WildWood’s projects is Wild Atlantic Rainforest but they are building a diverse portfolio of Things To Do to future-proof the Irish landscape and salvage what is left of its woody heritage.
I like the cut of their jib!
They are impatient with the months it takes for regulatory approval to notify the land registry of a switch from farrrming to agri-forestry. By statute, prospective home-builders must get an answer from the CoCo Planning Office by 8 weeks maximum. Consider Old Peadar, whose hip is now futzed and he can mount up his MF35 no more. Wildwood would like to present an option of planting the Peadar Memorial Oak Forest as his legacy. But by the time Wildwood negotiate the regulatory and logistic inertia of (Coillte, DeptAg, NPWS, NoneSoHardy) to get their whips in a row for planting, Peadar has set his acres to his neighbour to secure some sort of income from his asset. This despite setting for grazing at con-acre having a smaller return on investment than the effectively unavailable government grant for trees.
And HomeTree took a currently deserved swipe at The Man for botching the roll-out of Acres, the latest DeptAg scheme for supporting and manipulating the behaviour of farmers. One of the line-items in Acres is a subsidy / premium for planting new quick-thorn hedges. No such scheme would be approved without a scoping exercise to ascertain the potential demand across the nation. The plain farmers of Ireland have signed up for 7 million Crataegus monogyna whips . . . but there were only 1 million such available in Ireland. Sooo, 6 million whips are going to be imported from abroad: wreaking who-knows-what effect on Irish thorn biodiversity. Acres is still at least a year behind on approving us for a) gates b) clearing stone ditches for insolation. An effective organisation would have launched the roll-out of product in lock-step with rolling out the paperwork. DeptAg is a disorganisation: slow to change; blinkered in their views, superficial in assessing the changes it adopts; changing the changes.
A tuthree other HomeTree anecdotes have my appro.
① Pearl-clutching eco-warriors are embedded in their certainties about “native” this and that. There are 6 species of “native” willow Salix . . . although they are all more or less inter-fertile and Salix-x crosses are part of natural variation. But Salix viminalis is definitely not native despite being The Preferred for weavers and basketeers. HomeTree say “why ever not plant Salix viminalis as part of a foulwater remediation swale?? it a) works for the swale and b) can supply product to local artisans. It’s like Kiwi Sean the Forester carrying a bit of a torch for sycamore Acer pseudoplatanus: an invasive-of-long-standing as a candidate for replacing ash Fraxinus excelsior in Irish hedgerows as ash die-back crumbs the latter.
③ Oak Quercus robur is in the top drawer for re-afforesting Ireland with broad-leaf hardwoods. Oak supports a fantastic array of commensal species but folk in the business of planting trees, even those that won’t live to see a return (unless we start living for 200 years instead of 100), would prefer a product that will be useful to people: shipbuilders, turners, carpenters, wheel-wrights. That means a trunk as long and straight as possible from the bole. There is native oak growing in the windswept, salt-soiled, soggy Wild Atlantic Rainforest [W.A.R.]. But acorn gatherers who are providing the wherewithal for the re-forest roll-out turn their backs on the stunted bent-in-two hardy oaks on coastal Co Mayo. Brfffp! Wrong: given ‘better’ soil and adequate starting shelter, W.A.R. oaks will grow in a much more soldierly fashion. And, they will supply untapped genetic diversity for support growth in adverse conditions which the effete elite trees of the sheltered midlands can only dream of. Whoa? Nature && nurture; genetics && environment . . . who’d ha' thunk? HomeTree are not proscriptive but rather pragmatic and holistic. I wish them every success.
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