Another Life: Counting sheep isn’t what it used to be

‘For most of an hour’s hike, this bog is a desert of black slime, pricked here and there by a miserable stubble . . . The bog’s final break-up into black mush is a shocking thing to see.” That’s from this column in January of 20 years ago, describing the degradation of a hillside in the nearby Sheeffry Mountains. There was scarcely a sheep in view that day; they’d all moved on and upwards, desperate for another bite of food.

It took an aerial view to show the worst horrors of western overgrazing in the 1990s and beyond. One remote valley in the Twelve Bens, in Connemara, was a great, dark wound, skinned and suppurating with surface water and covering hundreds of hectares. Such severe damage was still rare and local, perhaps 5 per cent of the national area of commonage. Some 70 per cent of it was undamaged. But there was evidence enough of the folly of EU policy in paying hill farmers per head of sheep without considering the kind of land they were grazing.

Today most hills are greener, if usually still without the heather that was nibbled to the roots. Intensive commonage surveys brought a cut in hill-sheep numbers, widely of 30 per cent. Even at the 50 per cent or more demanded in the worst areas, five years was often enough to see a regrowth of sedges and grass. The National Parks and Wildlife Service, with the Department of Agriculture, fixed stocking rates in some 4,500 separate plans for commonages: the maximum of sheep to avoid overgrazing, the minimum to keep scrub away.

That was before the latest changes in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and the arrival of Glas, the new agri-environmental scheme devised and submitted by Ireland. The Irish for “green” is in keeping with the ecofriendly policy thrust from Brussels. But it stands for a system of grants that includes the Republic’s 440,000 hectares of commonage – more than a million acres – and its complexity has thrown hill farmers of the west into confusion and dismay.

Ancient roots

Commonage is a remarkable phenomenon, with ancient roots in Brehon law and a peasant farming system that shared out land into small plots for crops and common “outfield” land for grazing. In the modern restructuring of farmland, commonage was separated off by mountain walls. Farmers have kept individual common-law rights to graze the commonage, without interaction with any other owner. Many communities had agreement between neighbours about the use of commonage, but the modern years of headage payments prompted some reckless opportunism.

About 15,000 farmers now claim commonage for the EU’s single farm payments. Glas now introduces a system of further annual payments for commonage owners who take part in collective agreements on stocking levels, guided by professional planners. This also gives them access to a long list of options, with payments for conservation, on the whole farm, serving particular birds (corncrake, hen harrier, twite, etc), creation of wild-flower margins, and so on.

The level and difficulty of agreement insisted on by Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney have moved western farmers to protest meetings and demonstrations. He first insisted on 80 per cent agreement among owners of a commonage. And then went on to create a "second tier" of commonages with only 50 per cent agreement, but losing priority in individual access to Glas payments.

Complications abound. Achill Island, for example, has 557 commonage shareholders, only some of whom are still “active”. Those on Mweelrea Mountain have shares in 16 separate, if contiguous, townlands. Many farmers hold shares in separate commonages, each needing majority agreement. And the choice and supply of planners trained both in basic ecology and in mediation face a present deadline of 2015. Farmers dreading the delays of “second tier” agreement are the most upset.

Times have changed for commonage. Ageing farmers have given up using it while still claiming it in their acreage. Younger farmers have done the same and turned to off-farm jobs. “Active” farmers, on the other hand, with sheep on the hill, have been held to stocking levels that don’t recognise the changes in use – hence the melting pot of the new agreement process.

Some observers fear a return to overgrazing, but a big motive for the change is just the opposite: fear of undergrazing. The spread of gorse, bracken and rhododendron is "not good for man, beast or biodiversity", as the botanist Dr Andy Bleasdale told a Dáil committee last year. Working for Teagasc, and since then with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, he led the painstaking surveys and creation of commonage framework plans. Invasion of commonage by scrub leads to abandonment and its loss from the EU single farm payments.

Nor, perhaps, would it serve the recreational appeal that might offer potential alternative income. Visions of clothing the bare hills in native oak and Scots pine seem as phantasmagorical as ever.