Farmers who cut Ireland’s vital hedgerows could be in for a shock

The website of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (npws.ie) is normally an eager and amiable window on its work in the Irish countryside. Its current news offers sterner stuff.

Accounts of recent court cases describe successful proceedings against farmers who have illegally destroyed hedgerows and trees in the bird-breeding season. They speak for the new "zero-tolerance" policy announced in March by the NPWS and welcomed by Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, a Green Party TD.

Such cases rarely make headlines away from the farming press, and their details do not normally compete for space with those of sexual or violent malfeasance. One fine of €6,000, however, was big enough to gain some attention, if still arguably modest for the total of offence.

The judgment was against a Co Laois farmer for destroying, last May, 54 mature hardwood trees, including five oak and 27 ash, along with 1,200m of hedgerow and 3½ acres of vegetation. This also brought wilful destruction of nests and eggs of protected wild birds. It was described by Kieran Buckley, the NPWS district conservation officer, who searched the fallen trees and hedges. He found the nests of blackbirds, bluetits, song thrushes, hedge sparrows, chaffinches and woodpigeons, some of which had broken eggs.

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The scale of the damage, Buckley told the court, was the worst he had encountered in his years with the NPWS. (His work, of which I’ve written, also included the successful project at Lough Boora to restore the near-extinct grey partridge to the countryside.)

The farmer pleaded guilty and was warned by Judge Geraldine Carty: “Don’t come back.”

Second case

Co Offaly was the location of a second court case involving destruction in the bird-nesting season, this time of 109m of hedgerow. Old stretches of mature ash and whitethorn were piled in a corner and burned. The farmer, who pleaded guilty, was fined €1,000.

The new “zero tolerance” militancy of the NPWS was announced in early spring by regional manager Padraig O’Donnell: “We’re experiencing a crisis in our countryside. We’re losing hedgerows for ever, and we need to temper it. There are legal exemptions, and this is not about people clipping a hedge but destruction of hedgerows, which have been growing for hundreds of years and supporting huge biodiversity. Once destroyed, they’re gone for ever.”

He went on to promise more conservation rangers and an overdue Wildlife Crime Unit. Such publicly expressed concern has been rare in the NPWS – has a Green Minister helped to release the agency’s mojo, long pent up and under-resourced?

O’Donnell was encouraged by a successful prosecution in Co Kildare, again reliant on the industrious Kieran Buckley. Judge Desmond Zaidan, noting public concern about hedge-cutting in the birds’ nesting season, asked Buckley if the farmer’s destruction had been carried out with malice. The farmer, he was told, had said he was “tidying up the place” and that he seemed indifferent to the consequences of his actions.

The cases arose from public complaints to the NPWS, of just the kind urged by O’Donnell. With a national total of 72 rangers, enforcement can vary. Still, records show 88 successful prosecutions between 2007 and 2020 for illegal hedge cutting or removal, with the fines often paid to BirdWatch Ireland, the Irish Wildlife Trust or, in one case, the Offaly grey partridge project.

Carbon sinks

Among her reproofs to the Laois farmer, Judge Carty told him his actions had “done nothing to help climate change”. As safe repositories of CO2 and Ireland’s best equivalents to forest, hedgerows are now vital to Ireland’s carbon-saving “mitigation” targets.

But what length of hedgerows do we have and how is their “biomass” – their living volume – to be measured? From the tight-cropped hedges of some intensive farming to the billowing branches of hedges farther west, their absorption of CO2 can vary field by field.

A national figure of 300,000km of hedges has found general use, but this was based on partial county surveys. Research for the Environmental Protection Agency has produced very different figures. A 2014 study used a wider recognition of "hedgerow" to reach a national length of 689,000km.

It also suggested that hundreds of kilometres of hedgerow had been removed a year, compared with perhaps 1,050km over six years granted permission under environmental regulations. Since 2009, farmers have been granted a limited hedgerow removal in return for planting equivalent lengths of new hedge, but inspection to follow up the bargain is minimal.

Until new technology is used to sample the volumes of managed and unmanaged hedges, their contribution to Ireland’s carbon stock is still uncertain. Writing off the merits of radar, the EPA study recommended “a national point cloud-based inventory” every five years, sampling varieties of biomass by drones equipped with lidar.

This bounces pulses of laser beams off the twigs, or so I am led to suppose.