Obligation of Landowners

Preserving biodiversity is not just the duty of government, whether national or local government. It should also be a citizen’s duty. Every scrap of land in Ireland is owned by somebody and landowners are key figures in the debate.

In fact the two largest landowners are Coillte and Bord na Mona. There are signs that attitudes to conservation are changing within both bodies. This is partly because of a more enlightened approach to biodiversity. Examples of this are the development of the Boora Parklands on cutaway bog in County Offaly by Bord na Mona and Coillte’s Open Forest policy. It is also because the economics of both peat extraction and the production of timber have changed radically in recent years, allowing both bodies to contemplate alternative uses for their land holdings. This trend must be encouraged.

Coillte and Bord na Mona both own a lot of land but the bulk of our countryside belongs to thousands of individual farm families. The economics of farming have changed at least as dramatically as the economics of timber and peat production. If, as a nation, we are serious about preserving and enhancing our biodiversity we must incorporate this aim into the changing face of farming. This was the intention behind several agri-environmental schemes such as the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) and more recently the Green, Low-Carbon, Agri-Environment Scheme (GLAS). Both schemes did not work out in the way they could have done however in terms of environmental conservation. This doesn’t mean that imaginative new ideas, at a local, national or EU level, could not be developed to further the original aims of such schemes.

Even people who just own a small garden can contribute to biodiversity. There is no doubt that people who feed garden birds and put up nest boxes have made a huge contribution to the healthy populations of some bird species. Most of the data comes from Britain, but it undoubtedly applies here as well. There is also no doubt that environmentally friendly or organic methods in gardens and public parks are very beneficial, particularly to insects. There is a worrying decline in the numbers of pollinating insects in this country and other insect species form the base of a food pyramid on which larger animals depend.