An ecologist is warning that Ireland’s legislation for dealing with fires that were deliberately started is 30 years out of date and the current deterrents are not sufficient.
Pádraic Fogarty told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that “in the very unlikely event” that a person was caught and prosecuted, fines might be hundreds of euro, “which really is not a deterrent”. Fogarty also said there were mixed messages about “controlled burning”, which should not be acceptable at any time.
“Fires should be unacceptable on land,” said the ecologist, author and rewilding campaigner. “We should not be burning land full stop. This comes back to what I think is the fundamental problem with our unpreparedness ... our land use is such that our ecosystems are completely degraded.
“It’s meeting now a worsening climate situation where we get more and more prolonged dry spells. So we’re going to see more and more of these fires and worse fires unless we start addressing our land-use issues.”
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Fogarty said hills, where many of the wildfires were occurring, were peatland habitats and, as such, should be wet.
“They should be our climate champions because peat is so important for storing carbon. And they should also be really important biodiversity areas, except they’re extremely degraded state, which means they dry out very quickly and are very fire vulnerable.
“So, the response should be basically the opposite of that, basically trying to keep as much water on the hills as possible. We need to get our forests back into our hills.
“Our native forests, which used to cover the hills, are not flammable. And we’ve seen that even in national parks recently, where the flames just don’t go into areas where we have intact natural forests. Unfortunately, we’ve cleared out nearly all of our native forests from the hills, but we could reverse that.
“We also have a forestry model based on monocultures of one particular type of conifer tree, and that exacerbates the fire problem. This is a huge issue in France and Spain, where these vast monocultures are fuelling the flames. So we need to be transitioning to different types of commercial forestry.”
[ Why Europe’s wildfires are proving so fierce and difficult to stopOpens in new window ]
The ecological damage from wildfires was catastrophic, Fogarty added, saying much of the damage had been done in recent years in areas where land was already in “dire” condition.
The government’s response to nature restoration regulations was very important, he said. The laws were in place, plans had been put together, but funding measures needed to be implemented in the forthcoming budget.
“If they don’t put money behind it or they don’t put sufficient money behind it, you won’t get the confidence of landowners or communities to get behind it and do this massive job of work that needs to be done,” Fogarty said.
