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The Heritage Bill will come before Dáil Éireann on Wednesday after coming through almost 36 hours of debate in the Seanad.
Under the bill, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Heather Humphreys has proposed changes to the hedgecutting and gorse burning dates.
For hedgecutting, it is proposed that controlled cutting be allowed in August on a two-year pilot basis, and for gorse burning it is proposed to be allowed on a controlled basis in March.
Currently, both hedgecutting and gorse burning are banned from 1 March to 31 August.
Concerns
Speaking at a press conference on the Heritage Bill on Tuesday, Senator Alice Mary Higgins said that the bill is more urgent now than before and its debate in the Dáil comes at a time when we’ve lost so much habitat in the last few months.
Outlining their concerns at the press conference, were Birdwatch Ireland, the Hedge Laying Association of Ireland, the Federation of Irish Beekeepers Association and the Irish Wildlife Trust.
Bird species at risk
Alex Copeland of Birdwatch Ireland said that there are a number of priority species that the NGO would have concerns about should the legislation go through.
“The first one I’m going to start with is the yellowhammer. It nests in hedgerows, hedges are very important to it.”
He said that 5% of yellowhammers still have chicks in nests at the end of August, so cutting in August could have a huge effect on this species.
“Why is that a big issue for this species? Yellowhammer are red-listed, they’ve undergone huge declines in Ireland in the last 40 years.
“In the 1970s, they would have covered the whole of Ireland, whereas now they are just located in the south east of the country. They are dependent on tillage farming and the hedgerows in which they nest.”
Copeland also outlined that the barn owl. This is a species that is quite thinly spread mostly in the south of Ireland. It is hugely dependent on hedgerow habitats, not for nesting but for foraging, he said.
“It follows along hedgerows looking for small mammals. Hedgerows are an essential habitat for our wildlife.
“In the uplands, we’re concerned about the curlew. The curlew have the dubious honour of being the most threatened breeding bird that we have in Ireland.
“It’s not just on the Irish red list, it’s on the global red list. In Ireland we’ve approximately 125 pairs. The big threat to the curlew from the Heritage Bill is from the risk of burning during its nesting season in March. Burning in March is particularly bad for upland birds.”
Irish Wildlife Trust
Also speaking at today’s event was Padraic Fogarty of the Irish Wildlife Trust, who said the trust has been concerned about the burning of uplands for many years.
“Today, the uplands are knackered. The habitats are eroding, the vegetation is gone, half the birds are either extinct or on their way to extinction.
“I would also say that reading the farming press, that sheep farmers also think they are an endangered species. Their way of life is also on the way out.
“I would contend that it is not a coincidence that farming in the hills and the nature are both deteriorating in tandem with each other.
“Changing the dates won’t make a difference to the situation. We already have fires in March, in April and May, because that’s what happens every year.”
Fogarty said farmers are not engaged in controlled burning, in the official sense of the word whereby they have to notify the authorities and receive permissions.
“If we can reward farmers for guarding the landscape, for all the multiple benefits they provide, that is the key to getting out of the mess that we’re in.”
Read more on the proposed changes to the Heritage Bill in this week’s Irish Farmers Journal on Thursday.
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