It is hard not to envy John Moran on a day like the one we’ve found for our walk across the commonage he farms, in the shadow of Glennamong Mountain in Mayo.

Underneath us, Clew Bay rolls away toward Croagh Patrick on the southern side of the bay. Most of John’s 200 ewes are on two islands in the bay, along with the rams.

“I’m lucky, you can walk across the bay to one island once a week, and to the other once a month.” Such restricted walking access to the lowland grass means careful planning for the movement of his animals.

John and Gerry Loftus, a fellow commonage farmer, are explaining their way of life to me. John explains the importance of his flock to him, as they have learned behaviour passed down through the generations.

“My sheep will come back here having been on the lowland for six weeks, and they’ll run back up to the hill. It’s their home,” says John. Each of the many flocks sharing this commonage have their own area that they traditionally graze.

Lost sheep

“You couldn’t just buy in ewes and add to them to my flock. They’d wander off and never be seen again,” he says.

Similarly, no commonage farmer can ever sell sheep to his fellow shareholder. “If I sold sheep to my neighbour, they’d simply continue to graze my part of the hill, alongside my own. It would get overgrazed, and other parts would grow wild.”

It is a complex world, one with its own traditions and history that you can’t just blunder into. And yet that’s just what hill farmers would say the authorities did back in 1998.

That is when the original commonage management plans were first introduced. John and Vincent freely agree that there were issues of overgrazing “in some areas”, but the slide-rule compulsory reduction scheme was a blunt instrument.

“Government and policy encouraged the increase in hill flock sizes,” John says, then they forced a sudden and drastic reduction – either 30% or 70%. John went from 500 to 200 ewes.

It’s hardly any surprise that a whole new batch of problems then emerged.

Many people with small flocks felt the reduced number was no longer worth maintaining, and simply sold their remaining sheep.

Getting those people back on the hill will be a problem. The flock memory of where they grazed is gone, and gone forever.

Irreversible loss

That’s the big fear John and Gerry share: the irreversible loss of hill-farming skills in the most isolated parts of Ireland. “I learned how to herd sheep on the mountain at my father’s side,” says John, “but now my own sons have left the mountain”. One is in Australia.

Underlying much of the unhappiness hill farmers feel is the sense that what they do is not recognised as skilled in the way, say, dairy or beef production is. “Our skills have been handed down, and have seen us maintain the mountains and earn a living for centuries.

“If I moved on to a lowland farm, I’d make lots of mistakes, but if a lowland farmer tried took over my hill farm, he’d go hungry.”

John and Gerry talk around the range of issues that affect them: from GLAS to the ANC review, to designation and the restrictions it places on them.

Deeply opposed

They are deeply opposed to the refusal to allow privately owned unenclosed land into the GLAS scheme.

Gerry points to John’s owned hill land, which bounds the commonage. “There’s absolutely no difference in the land, or in what farming can be done on it – and yet it’s not eligible? It makes no sense.”

Both men are acutely aware that they are farming some of the most environmentally important and sensitive land in Europe.

As Gerry Loftus says: “When the bureaucrats go back to Brussels, and the planners are long gone, we’ll be here, like we’ve always been – unless they force us out of business.”

The Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association (INHFA) was formed less than two years ago, and the two men are county officers, John being Mayo chair and Gerry county secretary.

They say the organisaton was born out of frustration that the issues so close to them were not getting the same attention as, say, dairying. “Fairness, not favouritism, is what we say – and we mean that,” says Gerry.

It was GLAS, and how it treated commonage farmers, that triggered the birth of the INHFA. The original stipulation that at least 50% of commonage shareholders must join to let anyone into the scheme is gone, but they say the scheme is still hugely flawed.

“It’s not about more money. It never was. It’s about access to the scheme,” says Gerry.

Punished for neighbour’s breach

The potential of being punished if the commonage management plan is breached by other commonage shareholders is utterly unacceptable to them. They believe it will turn neighbour against neighbour.

“I should only be responsible for my own actions,” says John. Both men wish new commonage implementation committee chair Padraig Gibbons the best of luck, but believe he has a massive job on his hands.

“Hill farming is so important for the environment, to tourism,” says John. The Greenway cycle path runs through his land, and he was an enthusiastic supporter of its development. “It can’t be just allowed die, but that’s the danger. I’m still a young farmer on the hills, and I won’t see 50 again. The clock is ticking,” he warns.