Wetlands

Back when still part of the Ascendancy, I and others were at Morning Coffee [tea optional] in my department in Trinity College Dublin. My HoD, a leading light in the Protestant mafia started on about turning Achill Island, Co Mayo into a Jurassic wildlife park "re-introduce wolves Canis lupus and bears Ursos arctos - giant Irish deer Megaloceros giganteus were a hoof too far because they were all dead. "and what" someone asked, "would the plain people of Achill have to say about that?" Which put a stop to this fantastist's gallop.

We levered our arses off the sofa on Thursday night for film night in Visual Carlow. It was hosted by CCEN County Carlow Environmental Network and featured a very mixed bag of shorts about Wetlands - with a Q&A afterwards. The tickets were "Free" but there are significant opportunity costs [and petrol] to take 4 hours out of a winter evening to make a 90km round trip. The last 10m film was about the Drummin Bog Project DBP [prev] with local national school youngsters singing a song about bog myrtle and fraugháns. 

At the Q&A, one of the leaders of the DBP ruefully admitted that, 7 years in, it was only blow-ins, artists and poets who came for the open days of bog restoration. Local farmers, supposed beneficiaries of slowing water down in its rush from rain-sodden hills to the sea via the River Barrow, carry on regardless. Another Q&A contributor from the floor described a woeful breakdown in comms between management and inhabitants in Ballycroy Co Mayo where the National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS have designated 150 sq.km as Páirc Náisiúnta Néifinne Fiáine Wild Nephin National Park [R as mapped - yours for €11 - by the redoubtable yomping cartographer Barry Dalby].  A vengeful Queen Medb (or person or persons unknown) set Nephin on fire last April destroying walkways and other access infra-structure. That's my second-hand take on what went down in Nephin. RTE prefers the passive tense [gorse started burning . . . "Public urged to act 'responsibly' after Mayo gorse fires"] rather than finger-pointing. 

If I was really local, rather than a blow-in 30 years a-squatting, one of my neighbours would have told me who fired our mountain last year. But the chances are good that such a finger would have pointed at The Wrong Neighbour, so I am happier not to know. My neighbours are just folk: some kind and some with blunted empathy and some damaged beyond repair.

I don't know any of the details but it's reading like Nephin was conceived over coffee in Dublin rather than in the pubs of Ballycroy. And not half enough of the budget was allocated to bringing people on board. It's not enough to lurry out subsidies and financial incentives. Indeed paying people to do right by the curlews crotach Numenius arquata and plovers feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria  may be a counter-productive perverse incentive. Like the Israeli creche parents - if you pay people it becomes transactional and gets minimal [✓] response. If you can, by tale and example, induce even a minority to love their hares Lepus timidus [prev] and tormentil Potentilla erecta you won't need to pay anyone.