Mike O’Brien went to Iceland for two months as part of his professional work experience (internship) during the third year of his forestry degree in UCD. It’s a more unusual placement than most. But before we delve into that, Irish Country Living backtracks to sixth year and wants to know why Mike put forestry on his CAO in the first place?

“At home in Kilkenny we have what they call an old Irish woodland around my house where we have the horses. From a young age I would have been riding horses though the woodland, so you’d be trying to identify different trees and why is this one different than that one, and you’re trying to figure out the leaf types and you’re trying to tell them apart. So I suppose that kind of inspired me to get into the forestry game.

“I thought it’d be nice if you could work in this kind of an atmosphere every day.”

Fast-forward to April 2016 and he was doing just that – but in Iceland – thanks to the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science’s contacts in the Icelandic Forest Service, which is Iceland’s version of Coillte.

Before Mike got settled into his work, there were a few things he had to get used to. For example, the weather changed hugely in the two months Mike was in Iceland.

When he arrived in April it was -15oC to -16 oC some mornings, but by the time he left in June it was about +16oC. Similarly, when he first arrived there was about four hours of complete darkness every day but by the time he left “it was daylight all round the clock”.

Unsurprisingly, this was hard to get used to. “We were doing mad things like trying to block the windows and put tea towels over our heads to keep the sun out of our eyes just to try get to asleep,” says Mike.

Mike notes as well that the rapid change in weather was reflected in the grass.

“The grass even on the road goes from quite dead in April – yellowy looking when the snow melts – to full-blown nearly silage season in mid-June, it’s very quick” says Mike.

There were many different elements to Mike’s forestry work.

“We thinned a forest ... thinning is if you go into a field and there might be 2,500 trees in every acre of land. You thin a forest and you might bring that down to 1,250. You’d halve it just to give the trees room to breathe and grow and develop. Then we did some clearfell, which would be knocking all the trees in the whole acre.”

Mike’s team also planted trees, seedlings specifically – which are one-year-old tress – where they had cut down trees previously. They also did vegetation control, which meant using strimmers and brush cutters to cut grass and vegetation away from newly planted trees.

Mike used a chainsaw for a lot at work: “In Ireland conifer stands would be thinned with a harvester machine, followed by a forwarder which draws the timber. However, in Iceland, instead of the harvester they have forest workers with chainsaws and instead of using a forwarder they would use a tractor and winch to pull the timber out – so it’s very small-scale.”

Mike says that as in Ireland, a lot of the felled trees in Iceland are used to make sawn products, such as pallets, garden fencing and garden sheds.

“All the timber they produce in Iceland would mainly be used in Iceland because it’s home-grown and it doesn’t yield as quick as Irish timber, so they wouldn’t be competitive on a global scale,” explains Mike.

“The wood chips would be similar to here. They’d have them in burners for heating, but a lot of the heating in Iceland is geothermal heating … from the lava, which means heating is very cheap out there.”

Remote

Mike’s accommodation in Iceland was a forest cabin in the woods which had Wi-Fi and electricity. He lived there with another UCD forestry student, Stephen McMullan, and an Icelandic man called Magnus who also worked in the forest.

They were two hours from the closest town and four hours from the capital Reykjavik.

“We were more or less as rural as it gets,” says Mike.

They would drive to the local town to do their shopping for the whole week.

“It wasn’t like in Ireland where you can run down to the local corner shop to get a carton of milk or if you were stuck for a loaf of bread. In Iceland, when you shopped, you shopped for a full week. It was hard to get used to.”

They say it’s one of the most peaceful countries in the world – they don’t even have an army

While Mike says it was very remote, he also says: “It had a kind of a sense of peacefulness and you were close to nature over there. You woke up in the morning and, compared to home, there’d be birds crowing. You walk outside and you can hear the water rolling and you’ve these beautiful lodgepole pine trees all around you and it’s very scenic, it’s a very nice area. They say it’s one of the most peaceful countries in the world – they don’t even have an army.”

Even from a policing point of view, Mike says he saw about two police cars during his entire time there – and that was in the capital Reykjavik. Yet Iceland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

Mike, Stephen and Magnus spent their evenings doing chainsaw maintenance.

“For health and safety reasons, every day we’d always take the bar off the saw, we’d sharpen the chain, we’d check for oil, check the filter, do all the basic checks. After that we’d come in and we’d cook the dinner … in the evening time we might go for a walk through the woods. There’s a massive estate of timber – you’d be looking at an area of maybe 800 acres ... we would be looking at the different species.”

Seeing Iceland

At the weekends they went sightseeing and took in glaciers – among many other things.

“It’s amazing. You can drive right up to the volcanos ... there’s these geysers that bubble hot water out of the ground ... anywhere you go it’s a good couple of hours driving but when you get there it’s worth it,” says Mike.

He says the Icelandic people like to think of themselves as a long-distance relation to the Irish.

“They like to think that my great, great grandfather kind of thing came from Ireland and it was Irish Vikings who settled in Iceland thousands of years ago. They have great time for the Irish, they love us.”

Iceland is a sparsely populated country with a population of approximately 320,000. Mike says Reykavik is about the size of Kilkenny city.

“What I found most interesting out of all is when you’re in the pubs or on a night out, the native Icelandics have an app on their mobile phone which shows their family tree – so before they meet someone they can check if they’re related. I’m deadly serious! Because it’s such a small population, they could be your fifth or sixth cousin!”