DEAR SIR: If you’re reading this letter, then I’m eating my hat, because I made a bet that the Irish Farmers Journal wouldn’t touch this because it might be seen as too ‘critical’ or negative. The last couple of years have seen Greta’s school strikes, Attenborough’s shocking documentaries and relentless reportage of extreme weather events, some near home.

The realisation that something is wrong with how we are relating to our planet is at last mainstream. And some of that realisation includes an understanding that how we treat our own Irish countryside is part of the bigger picture of global climate change and species loss.

The bad thing is that the creeping destruction of natural habitat is continuing up and down our land, despite the available knowledge and incentives to do better

Words and phrases such as biodiversity, carbon storage and pollinator plants have entered everyday discourse. In fact you can’t escape them.

The bad thing is that the creeping destruction of natural habitat is continuing up and down our land, despite the available knowledge and incentives to do better. So why has knowledge not led to more positive action?

Take hedgerows. In Ireland they are our single most important type of habitat for wildlife of all kinds. Two thirds of our native birds nest in hedgerows, for example. Yet their removal is encouraged by the lure of short term productivity from larger arable fields which allows ever bigger machinery to till and harvest more quickly. The resulting loss of pollinating invertebrates, vital for crops like rapeseed and beans for example is not considered. Nor is soil erosion, flooding, silted streams, loss of shelter and the creation of bleak featureless landscapes, windblown and devoid of interest, natural beauty or birdsong.

Dairy and beef farms are subjected to similar ‘productivity’ pressures leading to the creation of exposed paddocks and 10ha ranch-style prairies.

The removal of hedges is aided and abetted by a regulatory system that is ineffective and broken. Some 98% of applications for ‘restructuring’ - or hedgerow removal - are approved by DAFM officials. The figure in some counties is 100%. As for the ‘carrot’ of incentives for good-quality hedgerows, buffer strips and field corner habitats, these are insufficient and contradictory in their design.

The expansion and proper resourcing of the NPWS has been long awaited and is an undertaking of the current programme for government

Meanwhile the ‘stick’ of oversight by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is a broken twig: this service is grotesquely understaffed and unable to respond to such challenges as out of season cutting or illegal destruction. So what’s to be done? The new CAP offers a great white hope of a better system of rewarding good hedgerow practices by incentivising the retention, creation and good husbandry of native hedges and the creation of wider buffer strips alongside.

Measurement of carbon capture by hedgerows will help drive this. The expansion and proper resourcing of the NPWS has been long awaited and is an undertaking of the current programme for government.

As is a national hedgerow survey, though while welcome, there is a real risk that yet another report could be used to delay immediate achievable actions such as a meaningful oversight of restructuring applications to the Department and other short term interventions.