Seeing red on green issues

Out here at the edge of things, enjoyment of nature could be wonderfully uncomplicated and this column remain as soothing as the rumble of the surf. Unfortunately, as a not-entirely-reconstructed newspaperman, I keep one toe plugged into events beyond the hill. Like the stream that feeds our kitchen tap, a flow of press-releases and network digests ripples daily across my computer screen.

Sometimes, ripple is scarcely the word: raging torrent is more like it. Nature conservationists (not mere "lovers" any more) have become infinitely more assertive, and their organisations well equipped to hold their own in any ecological company. But their frustrations with officialdom can burst forth in rash language and no little paranoia (for the full militant flavour, as well as more constructive exchanges, subscribe to natureireland@egroups.com).

"Destructive and propagandist . . . strident and suspicious" - this is the tone of much their criticism, at least as it reaches Dr Alan Craig, director of National Parks and Wildlife in Duchas, the heritage service. At a recent scientific symposium on Ireland's landscape history, he regretted "a widespread breakdown of trust" and the fact that "the (European) Commission appears to encourage non-governmental organisations to exercise a policing role over the performance of government bodies, rather than co-operating with them". Much of this rancour has stemmed from the vigorous dissatisfaction of the five main conservation organisations (An Taisce, BirdWatch Ireland, Coastwatch Europe, Irish Peatland Conservation Council and Irish Wildlife Trust) with the number of SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) proposed by Duchas under the EU Habitats Directive.

They have alleged that of Duchas's list of more than 360 SAC sites, "many" are already protected in national parks (actually not true, apparently: only parts of six sites are included in parks, perhaps five per cent of the total SAC area). And they have sent Europe their "shadow" list of another 400 sites for consideration as SACs. Many of these are small but still precious locations which they see as necessary "stepping stones" for wildlife between the bigger habitats. Almost half of them, however, says Duchas, are already included within official proposals.

A persistent black mark for Ireland in the international conservation tables, often cited as a "disgrace" by the critics, has been the fact that only one per cent of the national territory is given the strict protection of national parks and reserves, compared with the average 12 per cent in other developed countries.

The criterion of "strict protection" (as applied by the World Conservation Union) does not, indeed, extend to SACs, some of which are being used to wrap an ecological buffer zone around our six national parks. As now proposed, the SACs cover 10 per cent of the Republic's land area, including one per cent for lakes, and an additional four per cent for marine areas (including, for example, the whole of the Shannon Estuary). This, says Duchas, puts Ireland midway in the SAC rankings of EU member states, behind countries with proportionately much more mountain or forest (Denmark's initially impressive 24 per cent turns out to be two-thirds marine). Despite official satisfaction that enough sites have been forwarded to Brussels, the number is still not closed. Duchas will soon publish a substantial further list of salmon-river SACs. The fish is a listed species in the Habitats Directive, and the meagre extent of its protection so far raised eyebrows in the Environmental Protection Agency's recent Millennium Report.

More salmon sites have been urged by the EU Commission, and it has also called for an improved list of raised bogs, reflecting Ireland's greater share of this dwindling habitat. The Irish Peatland Conservation Council, delighted with such a response, has gone on to assemble a national list of fens, most of which, it claims, have never been properly surveyed. The conviction that the State is doing as little for nature as it can get away with is central to much of the thinking in conservation organisations. Duchas, on the other hand, points to Ireland's early legal protection of proposed SACs (from 1997), well ahead of actual designation, as an earnest of good faith.

Right across Europe, no government is rushing to exceed some hopefully objective norm of conserving "representative" habitats. The constraints are not merely financial (Ireland's compensation package alone will work out at about £20 million annually), but also the broadly political cost of curbing landowners' activity across large areas of the countryside.

Duchas acknowledges that the informal operational style of its staff in sorting out farmers' objections to SAC boundaries on the ground has certainly slowed the pace of submitting sites to Brussels, even to the point of angering the EU Commission. It has also fuelled dark suspicions of less-than-scientific boundary compromises. This is strongly refuted by Duchas, which argues that the extra attention to farmers' concerns will pay off in more solid and sustainable co-operation in the longer term.

The past decade's frenetic workload, often beset by controversy, must certainly have taken its toll on an agency pursuing supposedly popular issues of nature conservation.

They have been exacting years, too, for the conservation organisations, with little time to spare on either side for positive contacts or a proper flow of information.

In a more amiable era, Dr Alan Craig represented An Taisce on the first statutory Wildlife Advisory Council with the blessing of his OPW employers. The decades since have brought a politicisation of green issues and the birth of an alternative, so-called "civil" society whose urgent convictions and suspicions are not always civilly expressed.

Perhaps this is the price of Ireland's now-or-never commitment to protecting basic lebensraum for nature.