Nature scorned

When the novelist T.H. White went to live on a lonely 10,000-acre "grouse moor" in north Mayo in the late 1930s, with his red setter and peregrine falcon, he knew well what he was doing. "As for the famous grouse," he wrote in The Godstone and the Blackymore, "at a generous estimate there may have been a hundred in all those thousands of acres. Several guns, ranging the mountains all day behind a passable setter, might end with three or four brace."

But this, he reckoned, made it a first-rate place for hawking. "A peregrine on a well-stocked moor would not be interesting. She would have killed her maximum in half-anhour or less, too easily, and it would be time to go home."

White's rented hunting lodge at Sheskinmore was at the edge of the great tract of mountain bogland - the "Owenduff-Nephin Beg complex" in today's desk language - now planned as a national park by Duchas.

It covers the curving massif of the Nephins and the windswept expanse of oceanic bog along the Owenduff River. To the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, who shared these sombre horizons with White, it was "the very loneliest place in this country".

That, at least, has not changed. But much else has. Whole valleys and hillsides are now cloaked in conifers, or clear-felled for the next spruce planting. And outside Coillte's fences is some of the worst overgrazing in Connacht: appalling moonscapes of erosion. You could trudge the black mud of the moor for a day and never raise a pipit, never mind a grouse.

The EU has put up money towards creating the park and has helped compensate farmers for a hefty reduction in flocks (this not only in the Nephins, but in western hill country generally). All this goes some way to remedy CAP's own blunder in subsidising a reckless increase in sheep for two decades, regardless of the kind of land they grazed.

When the European Commission deplores the damage to "the fragile peat soils" of Ireland, and the Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, laments "the devastating effects of sheep overgrazing", the left hand is wringing the right hand. But throughout, of course, the Republic's own farming officials were complicit, shutting their eyes for years to what was happening in the hills.

There are deep ironies to the EU Commission's decision to take the Republic to the European Court of Justice for its "failure to protect" the grouse's habitat in the Nephins and elsewhere. The overgrazing, it says, is "an unsustainable form of land use and a destruction of the outstanding natural assets". It has been demanding details of the common-age management plans meant to get grass and heather growing again in the damaged areas.

This adds to the pressure on Duchas to weld the North Mayo National Park together in a working partnership with local farmers - a difficult and delicate task, given their agrarian traditions. It also makes this a critical year for Ireland's delivery of on-the-ground measures to restore the ravaged upland landscapes.

Commonage by common-age through the western counties, detailed "framework plans" are being worked out with farmers by teams trained from Duchas. These will have to be co-ordinated with the next wave of farmers accepted into REPS, the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, and also those who want Duchas farm plans to fit their holdings to the needs of Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). It is a complex, laborious affair, made no easier by the downbeat mood of many farmers in scenic areas.

Is this really all about the red grouse, Lagopus lagopus scoticus, a local, distinctively pale sub-species of Europe's willow ptarmigan? Of course not, any more than saving sand dunes from golf courses is all about rare snails, relics of the Ice Age and the size of pin-heads. In any threatened habitat there are key species with distinctive needs that stand as symbols, as it were, for the wider ecosystem.

The red grouse is the one bird that really depends on moorland, living there all year round, eating almost nothing but the shoots, buds and flower-heads of heather, and relying on the plant for shelter and cover. Without heather, there is no grouse - but this becomes shorthand for conserving a whole natural habitat.

As White's memoir suggests, north Mayo was never really a prime haunt for grouse, even when heather grew as luxuriantly as it does today in the national parks of Connemara and Donegal. Western bog heather, drawing much of its food from the rain, just doesn't pack the nutrients of the same plant growing in the Wicklows or the Mournes.

It was in north Mayo, at Glenamoy in the 1960s, that work was done to find the best ways of building up grouse numbers. Experimental plots of bog were fenced against sheep, drained and fertilised, and the heather systematically burned in patches to produce fresh crops of shoots. And it worked: the numbers of grouse came up to the productivity levels of the closely-managed commercial moors of north-east Scotland.

A small scattering of grouse still survives on the north Mayo moors. Token rarity or not, the Commission's concern for them should press the pace of recovery of our blanket-bog uplands in general. This is an intricate wild world, mantled in a rich weave of plants, and its abuse has been a shameful chapter in Ireland's care of the land.

Blind overgrazing offends against the whole of nature - including the human species. On hills stripped of heather and moorgrass and its attendant insect life, rain rushes sheep excrement into the streams and high lakes and on into the farm pipes and water schemes of the people living below. Sales of bottled water in the west have rocketed, as whole communities lose faith in the safety of water from the tap. Now the EU Commission is taking Ireland to court over poor water quality. Thus, the fate of the grouse turns out to have a bearing on our own health and happiness. Ecology is the story of life's connections.