Fighting for deer life in Killarney National Park

Life has been tough these past few weeks for the wild red deer of Killarney. In the hunger of a late, cold spring, when new grass is slow to push up the mountain slopes, the deer turn to anything palatable, chewing discarded antlers and even eating carrion. Sean Ryan, their attentive chronicler in the mountains, once watched a hungry hind try to pin down a jumping frog.

But however severe their late-winter mortality (typically about 40 animals), this is at least a natural cull. At a time when Britain's deer are being drawn into the foot-and-mouth disaster, the implications for our own wild herds of any island-wide infection would be worrying indeed.

The 700 red deer in the Killarney National Park are the genetically pure core of a species that has survived in Ireland since prehistory. In the Wicklow hills, the deer are hybrids, crossed with Japanese sika deer introduced by Lord Powerscourt in 1860. They lead mostly a forest life, like the widespread fallow deer left over from the Norman deer parks and the muntjac, a modern introduction now rapidly increasing in the north.

A few sika from Powerscourt were also sent to the deer park at Killarney, where their population soared to 1,500 within a century, quite outnumbering the reds. Before they were culled by half in the 1980s, their winter browsing had done a lot of damage, notably to the rare yew woods of Reenadinna. But without the pressure of confinement, there has so far been no hybridisation between the sika and the reds.

It was this danger that prompted the movement of a nucleus of Killarney deer to the newly-created Connemara National Park (the red deer at Glenveagh National Park in Donegal are descendants of deer imported from Scotland and England in the 1800s). In 1980, another nucleus was also airlifted to Charles Haughey's island of Inishvickillane, most remote of the Blaskets.

The island's original stag and three hinds have multiplied successfully to a herd of some 40 animals, grazing the mineral-rich grass on its craggy 100 hectares and sheltering among rocks from the Atlantic storms. As it turns out now, the ex-Taoiseach has provided an impeccable sanctuary for Ireland's most precious wild mammal.

The red deer stars in a new, celebratory book, Killarney National Park: A Place to Treasure (Collins Press, £25), produced without pay by a team of expert writers and edited by Killarney ecologist Bill Quirke. The proceeds from its sale (by Duchas in particular) will help fund nature conservation projects in the park. But along with the rich description of its habitats and history comes a picture of a national treasure under continuing siege by people who treat it merely as an exploitable resource.

Bill Quirke spells out some of the consequences of the extraordinary fact that the nature conservation priority of Ireland's national parks still has no legal protection. The Duchas chief superintendent of parks, Dr Alan Craig, agreed in a recent paper that "the legal position of the national parks is, by international standards, unsatisfactory". In an introduction to the book he continues to talk hopefully of "new legislation" to affirm that nature conservation is the first objective of the parks.

At Killarney, an apparent confusion about the duty towards public enjoyment was illustrated by some bizarre twists of policy, which had the national parks authority agreeing, at one point, to surrender 90 acres of parkland for a privately-owned golf course, and at another, five years later, opposing a golf course in the same stretch of woodland, designating it as a Special Area of Conservation. The SAC legislation, stemming from Europe, seems the effective interim safeguard for the park's responsibility to nature.

Until the park authorities formed a common front with local conservation groups, pressure from commercial exploitation was beginning to seem all too successful. The privately-run water buses that now operate on the park's lower lake, towering over the traditional small boats, were instigated by a political decision, not part of any park plan. Sean Ryan, in his chapter on the mountains, despairs about motorcycle scrambling (prohibited, but it happens), and the declared determination of some Killarney businessmen to have cable cars built to the summits.

The really dispiriting news ecologically is the continuing level of grazing by invading sheep and the fact that, after decades of scientific concern about its impact on vegetation and seedling trees, no effective action has yet been taken to control it.

Grazing in the park has been so heavy that there has been virtually no regeneration of young trees in any part of the oak forest for at least 60 years. A park management plan published in 1990 favoured driving off the sheep, impounding them, or taking their owners to court for persistent trespass. None of these measures, according to Quirke, is yielding significant results. As many as 2,000 sheep have been grazing the park's woods and mountains in recent winters, adding their appetite to that of more than 600 sika deer and perhaps 200 feral goats in competition with the red deer, and sentencing Killarney's woods to inevitable senescence and death.

The pressure is most severe in the western reaches of the park, which has the oldest, biologically richest and most inaccessible oakwoods, and where volunteers in summer workcamps, pioneered by Quirke a decade ago, have made real progress in clearing rhododendron, still the park's biggest conservation problem. A mere 10 kilometres of sheep fence along the boundary, he says, would hold the invaders out and give the woods a chance of a regenerating future.

At this point in the history of Ireland's premier national park, 70 years on from the original gift of its heartland, there seems no reason in the wide world why Duchas cannot secure Killarney's crucial boundaries - even if it takes a daily patrol to keep the fence intact.