The shadows of our native forests can be found in the placenames of townlands. The prefix Derry, for instance, derives from the word for oak, or oak wood: doire, such as at Derryclare (Dhoire Chláire) in Co Galway.
Many of these “Derry” placenames are now devoid of native trees of any type but, miraculously, Derryclare has managed to hold on to a tiny patch of original native oak forest, just 19 hectares.
To describe it as a beautiful place scarcely does it justice: centuries-old oaks with boughs draped in thick, spongy masses of moss form a canopy over a forest floor of woodland ferns and flowering plants. There are even a handful of yew trees – possibly ancient specimens – among the oldest living things on our island.
This tiny fragment was lucky to survive the forestry zeal of the 1960s. Industrial timber production, developed in Germany in the late 1800s, ceased to see forests as places of wonder and diversity, replacing them instead with spreadsheets of “yield classes” and imported species, all planted tightly in neat rows. These modern forests would bring jobs to marginal rural areas and opportunities to diversify away from livestock farming. Or at least that was the thinking.
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While the oak forest at Derryclare was spared, the surrounding hills were not so fortunate. In the mid-1960s the slopes of the mountain overlooking the native forest were drained, fertilised and planted with a mixture of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine.
In 1980 the ancient forest won statutory protection as a National Nature Reserve while the arrival of EU nature laws would see the open hills of the Twelve Bens mountains fall within a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), leaving the nearly 600 hectares of plantation forestry sandwiched between the two.
[ Forestry: The strong case for moving away from monocultureOpens in new window ]
The folly of placing plantation forests on bogs became apparent when the trees failed to become economically productive. In more recent years the carbon emissions from drained bogs have been shown to be substantial, leaving us with what has been euphemistically referred to as the “legacy issue” – swathes of commercially worthless plantations pumping out greenhouse gas pollution for which the State is liable in the form of fines for failing to meet climate targets.
Coillte, the State forestry company that manages these plantations, holds a vast estate of 445,000 hectares, 232,500 hectares of which is on peatlands, making them the largest single owner of peatland in the country.
In 2019, in response to the rising tide of public concern about climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, Coillte established Coillte Nature as its not-for-profit wing. Its projects were small relative to the size of the company’s landholding, but among them was a plan to remove the plantation at Derryclare and restore the lands to a mix of bog and native woodland.
[ Coillte ordered to stop felling at forest over fears for oak treesOpens in new window ]
The project was particularly welcome because of the wider potential of allowing the native forest at the base of the hill to expand for the first time in centuries while connecting with the Twelve Bens SAC and Connemara National Park to the north.
As the permanent removal of forests (as opposed to the conversion of one type of forest to another) constitutes land use change, Coillte was required to apply to Galway County Council for planning permission, which it did in early 2023.
However, despite extensive consultation between the various parties, including the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), permission was refused in 2024, ostensibly due to the risk to water quality from removing so many trees and what the county council said was the “absence of trialled and tested mitigation measures”.
In December 2024 a new application was submitted, and was approved in May 2025. At the same time, following the election of a new government absent the Green Party, and perhaps sensing that environmental priorities had slipped down the political agenda, Coillte axed its Coillte Nature initiative.
At the ancient oak forest, a sheep fence was installed in 2021 to exclude trespassing livestock which, along with shooting of deer, is allowing the forest to regenerate from natural seed sources.
Coillte, in a statement to The Irish Times, said it remained committed to its “strategic vision” to “redesign” 30,000 hectares of peatland forests for “climate and ecological benefits”. It described Derryclare as a “pathfinder project” that “will help inform the overall approach for doing peatland redesign at scale going forward”. “Significant work”, it added, had been completed to identify a 10,000 hectare “pipeline”, including the project at Derryclare.
It says that 125 hectares have been cleared of rhododendron, an invasive plant species, but so far, no conifer trees have been removed. On a visit to the forest this past summer, a sign welcomed visitors to the “Wild Western Peatlands” site but it otherwise looked just as it did seven years ago when this process first started. Coillte says it hopes to commence “full-scale operations” in late 2026 but it does not give a timeline for completion of works, only noting that the planning permission “involves a 10-year implementation”.
While the site at Derryclare is small, it is being watched closely as an indicator of the ability of the State and its semi-State companies to deliver nature restoration projects.
Under the EU’s Nature Restoration Regulation, Ireland must restore 20 per cent of habitats in need of restoration by 2030 and all habitats by 2050. Coillte has a particular responsibility given its public ownership structure, which covers a substantial 7 per cent of the State.
In 2020 the programme for government envisaged that Coillte’s mandate would be reviewed so that its obligations to address environmental objectives would not clash with its for-profit remit. However, this did not happen. In 2022 the Environmental Pillar, a coalition of environmental nongovernmental organisations, in a submission to Coillte’s strategy, said the company “must show clear leadership and commit to restoring, rehabilitating and sustainably managing a large proportion of the 232,500 hectares of peatland in their ownership with clear restoration targets and timelines”.
However, the subsequent abandonment of Coillte Nature led many to question its commitment to addressing pollution and land degradation issues.
Minister of State for Nature, Fianna Fáil’s Christopher O’Sullivan, has suggested that land managed by Coillte could be transferred to the NPWS for the creation or expansion of national parks and nature reserves. It is not clear how this would dovetail with Coillte’s strategy or if it would allow Coillte to unhitch itself entirely from its substantial portfolio of unprofitable lands.
Meanwhile, the planning process for projects such as Derryclare requires voluminous and costly studies and reports. The Environmental Impact Assessment Report, which was just one of the environmental reports required for planning, stretched to 520 pages. It is not clear to many in this sector whether such minute analysis is useful and there must surely be a case for looking at the thresholds for triggering these heavy-duty tomes that few people are ever going to read.
The fact that not a single exotic conifer has yet been removed from Derryclare may also be attributed to a lack of clear financing for nature restoration. Coillte is not the only body waiting to see whether the Government will stump up the cash to implement nature restoration actions.
We are lucky that the ancient forest at Derryclare has survived and its role as a fountainhead of biodiversity is set to take centre stage in this corner of Galway in the coming decades. It has taken 60 years to arrive at the cusp of undoing the disaster of plantation forestry at this sensitive site and much has been learned along the way.
There is an urgency now in accelerating the actual delivery of nature restoration at the scale needed. All eyes are on the Government and whether the substantial funding required to do this work will be forthcoming.
