The hills of Ireland present us with an odd paradox. On the one hand, they are where you’ll find our most scenic landscapes and are increasingly popular for walkers, tourists, Instagrammers and day trippers. These high places are also ecologically vital, being the sources of our main rivers and stores of carbon-rich peat soil.
On the other hand, however, they are in appalling condition.
Last December, the Government reported to the European Commission that all of the habitats of the uplands, including wet, dry and alpine heaths, blanket bogs and rocky slopes, were in bad or inadequate condition with many continuing to deteriorate.
The hills face many challenges. The most obvious is the presence of conifer plantations, those dark blocks of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine that have degraded the soil and obliterated the native vegetation. Ironically, the next most obvious thing is the lack of trees. Many of our hills, which were once cloaked with native forest, are now barren and treeless.
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This has come as a shock to many people who have long assumed that bare hills were not only normal, but qualified as a type of wilderness.
It was noted by the Minister of State for Nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, when he posted a video on Instagram in January last of a tiny island of lush vegetation in an upland lake, asking viewers to “spot the healthy patch of heather and vegetation that has avoided grazing pressures”, adding that “grazing pressures have a big impact on our upland habitats”, including from “invasive deer and high numbers of sheep”.
It was a rare acknowledgment at Government level of the impacts that excessive grazing has, particularly from sheep, on the hills. In his post, O’Sullivan acknowledged that “upland farmers are vital to maintaining healthy ecosystems” and that “farmers are up for the task of restoring nature”, adding that he wanted to see them rewarded for “doing the right thing”.
Upland farmers, like farmers across the country, are dependent upon the subsidy system, steered by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which delivers approximately €3 billion of public money to the sector every year. Farmers in receipt of this money must follow the terms and conditions and in upland areas these have generally failed to incentivise doing the right thing.
For instance, the €1.3 billion Forestry Programme, which was launched in 2022, explicitly excluded any land over 300m in the west of Ireland and 400m in the east. Anywhere with a peat depth over 30cm is excluded and while there is a good reason for this, as bogs are not appropriate for plantations, it disregards the benefits of naturally regenerating trees on peat soil. In essence, upland farmers are frozen out of forest grants.
That leaves continued sheep farming as the only source of income, which creates a problem.
The report to the Commission noted that “intensive grazing or overgrazing by livestock” was a high impact on upland habitat and included a particularly pointed quote from a National Parks and Wildlife Service staff member that “all of the designated peatland habitats in west Galway and southwest Mayo are under pressure from overgrazing by sheep ... This pressure is widespread and intensive in nature and by far the greatest pressure on, and threat to, the integrity and proper functioning of this habitat”.
If this is to change, it must be through how subsidies are paid to farmers. These can take the form of incentives for the things society wants (doing the right thing) and penalties for things that are deemed to be unacceptable: burning, overgrazing or deliberate habitat damage.
Every farmer in receipt of subsidies must conform to minimum standards of “good agricultural and environmental condition”, or GAEC. There are a number of GAEC measures and, according to the Department of Agriculture, the objective of GAEC2 is “to protect wetlands and peatlands”.
Fintan Kelly is senior land use officer with the Irish Environmental Network. He authored a submission to the Department on the measures under GAEC2 and suggested that they should discourage draining, burning, turf-cutting and grazing of blanket bogs during winter months and that “complete destocking [removal of livestock] should be considered where peatland areas have shown no improvement following management”.
Kelly says that, because Ireland has so much peatland, “if we could bring in a base level that would protect peat soil, that would have a really positive impact on the environment and the sustainability of farming”.
However, he says now that the process “was a complete waste of everyone’s time – all it did was aggravate farmers, cause a huge amount of distress and create paranoia around peat soil”.
He says regulation is needed “to ensure that there are certain practices that are so unsustainable or antisocial that they shouldn’t be happening”, but for nature restoration “we can’t get to ambitious action through regulation alone ... we can only do that through incentives.”
Incentives, or payments to farmers for measures that go beyond the minimum requirements, have been around since the 1990s, but we have very little to show for them, chiefly because they have been based on general actions that can be applied to any farm anywhere, rather than tailored measures designed to deliver a particular outcome.
The latest round of the CAP applies a new formula that pays farmers for results rather than actions and has been applying this to large areas of upland.
According to a paper looking at this change of approach and published in the journal, Agricultural Systems, Ireland’s application of these results-based agri-environmental payment schemes is now “Europe’s largest”. Among the advantages, the paper says, is that “farmers retained autonomy and flexibility over their farm management and were actively involved in decision-making”, while “empirical data shows improvements in habitat quality […] as well as benefits for non-target species”.
Derek McLoughlin is among the paper’s authors and is manager of the €20.6 million Wild Atlantic Nature project that aims to work with farmers and communities to improve the status of blanket bogs across a swathe of the north and west of the country.
So far, they have restored 2,000 hectares of bog and the lessons learned will, when the project finishes in 2029, dovetail with CAP payments. An army of advisers has already been across the country scoring plots of land based on the habitat quality – the higher the score, the higher the payment for the farmer.
McLoughlin says the scorecards are “an excellent, rapid way of evaluating our peatlands”. He says the buy-in from farmers is “generally good” and while acknowledging certain teething problems, he emphasises that the new system is a “huge shift” which is now “working well” and is “the only way to go from a restoration perspective”.
The effectiveness of the model is clear. However, during the scale-up, a cap on payments was introduced, which means the incentive to reach the highest standard has been removed. The bar, in other words, is not as high as it should be. McLoughlin says it’s human nature that “I might do more if you’re going to reward me more”.
In relation to sheep overgrazing, CAP rules still stipulate that farmers must have a minimum number of sheep, something that needs to be removed, but McLoughlin says that “it’s poor management ultimately”.
“You have stock [animals] that are out at the wrong time of the year or gathering in particular areas. There were more farmers on the hills in the past and animals were moved on or taken off as needs be.
“Some habitats have a better capacity for stock than others. Some don’t need animals, others do.” The solution is “a better approach to management”.
Talk of removing sheep from the hills altogether is “massively sensitive”, he says.
“From a farmer’s perspective, they feel their livelihood and way of life is being disrespected. It is suggested that they don’t exist as they are, that they need to get out of that profession, they need to move on.
“In some respects, we need more farming on the hills, in the broader sense of land management, and that’s where the trouble is – it’s succession, it’s lack of a potential future on the hills and the simplistic idea that the farmer shouldn’t be there.”
Subsidies to farmers have been designed to keep sheep on the hills, not people. Redirecting these payments to restoring nature as well as more sensitive ways of farming would be a win for everyone.
