Some of Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin’s earliest memories of being in nature are of fishing with her father and grandfather, wrapped in oilskins in a small boat on Lough Corrib, the lake’s waves lapping up against the vessel. They’d stop on an island and gather firewood to boil water for tea. Growing up in Carnacon in Co Mayo, on the shores of Lough Carra, from an early age she knew what to fish for (brown trout), and how to catch bait. In the woodlands surrounding Moore Hall, the grand house burned down by the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War and home to lesser horseshoe bats, she and her cousins would look for sorrel.
“When you grow up in the countryside, all of your experiences are in nature,” she says, taking a breather on a bench in a park close to her home in Dublin, “mucking around, helping – well, being in the way of – uncles and cousins collecting the hay.”
As one of Ireland’s best-known academics, Ní Shúilleabháin’s breadth of knowledge is wide. She graduated with a first-class honours degree in theoretical physics from University College Dublin, completing her PhD at the School of Education in Trinity College. She worked as a schoolteacher, and now lectures in UCD.
Simultaneously, her career as a broadcaster has been prolific, everything from science programmes to travel shows to radio. She has been a newspaper columnist, a touring musician, a compassionate breastfeeding advocate critical of the global baby formula industry – “we really shouldn’t be leaving it up to private industry, whose bottom line is profit, to tell you what the best thing is for your child”– a Young Scientist judge, and a lot more.
She is also a private person, often guarded in interviews, tacitly insisting that the focus should be on what she has to say, not who she is, and balancing a scepticism of celebrity culture with being in the public eye.
Ní Shúilleabháin is now coming to the end of her tenure as chair of the Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss, a process she says she has learned a huge amount from. Despite possessing a seemingly infinite capacity to turn her hand to whatever comes her way, she was initially reluctant to take on the role.
“I said straight up: I can’t do this, I don’t know half enough to be able to chair a Citizens’ Assembly. I was assured that a chairperson doesn’t need to be the expert, and you have an expert advisory group, which is brilliant to have. Your job is to make sure the members are informed enough to make recommendations to the Oireachtas.” She bought books on biodiversity, read “so many” reports, and brought herself “to a level where I felt a bit more comfortable”.
The assembly is now preparing to make recommendations to the Oireachtas. Like most of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assemblies, on whatever topic, once experts are in the room and information is presented, the citizen members do a huge amount of work to discuss, deliberate, and make recommendations. The outcome can be transformative, and often demonstrates how far ahead this pocket of the public, tasked with representing us all, are of the political system.
Recommendations include referendums on human substantive environmental rights (a right to a clean, healthy, safe environment, a stable and healthy climate, and the rights of future generations to these rights), and human procedural environmental rights (the Aarhus rights regarding access to environmental information), as well as a referendum on the substantive rights of nature (recognising nature as a holder of legal rights, comparable to companies or people), and procedural rights of nature (to be a party in administrative decision-making and litigation where rights are impacted).
I have seven uncles on my mum’s side who were farmers, all of my neighbours were farmers. I was in and out of farms, they’re familiar places to me, comforting places
There appears to be an implicit condemnation of the State’s approach to biodiversity to date, I say. “I think it’s explicit,” Ní Shúilleabháin responds, “I don’t think it’s implicit. That speaks to how passionate the room is about this. The recommendations are drafted based on the tables, the meetings, what they have said throughout all the work, and the wording is crafted and redrafted and voted on. That is something that is clear from the members: that not enough has been done. We have laws and policies there, and they’re not being enacted.”
She felt the impact of the process from the get-go in September. “We started with a speaker, Roman Krznaric. He wrote a book called The Good Ancestor. He challenged the room to start thinking not about ourselves, not just our children, but for seven generations’ time, and what we can do now that will impact seven generations. He gave us an exercise to stand up, close our eyes, and imagine a person in our world who is under five, and imagine them on their 35th birthday and what their world is like. And then imagine them on their 90th birthday, and they look at a photo of you. What are they thinking about what you have done, how you have impacted their lives, now that they’re 90?
“There were a lot of tears in the room, people were very moved by that. Everyone had a particular person in mind. But it set us off on a good note, because people realised that we have to stop thinking about this in electoral cycles. It needs to be longer than five- or 10-year plans. This needs to be long-term. We need to stop taking for granted that we have nature around us in Ireland, because it is being degraded the whole time.” She also cites the contribution of Kate Raworth, who famously conceptualised the “doughnut economics” model whereby human needs are met but within planetary boundaries, as hugely impactful.
The discourse around the climate and biodiversity crises are often moulded by media as farmers pitted against environmentalists and vice versa. This is not unique to Ireland.
“I had a conversation with a farmer only this week who had somebody come to their farm to assess it for biodiversity,” she says. “They were so proud that their field had more flora and fauna than the assessor had seen elsewhere, and said it was the best field in the county they had seen. The pride that instils is amazing. It think it’s great that the tide is turning, that farmers can be rewarded for restoring and protecting nature on their farms.
“Policy has gone against that for the past couple of decades; it’s been the policy-drivers who have been doing that on a national level, and on an EU level. We have to be able to listen to everybody. Yes, we need farmers. Farmers in Ireland are important to look after our countryside, but that has to be balanced by making sure our rivers and our fresh water and our land is in good nick.”
Farming was part of her upbringing. “I have seven uncles on my mum’s side who were farmers, all of my neighbours were farmers. I was in and out of farms, they’re familiar places to me, comforting places. My own grandad’s farm was an old, old farm, going back to the 1800s. There’s family history that goes with farms. I understand and recognise that. The land is more than just land. It’s part of your family heritage, something you want to look after and have for the next generation. It’s not just farmers that feel that.” Her father is from Corr na Móna in Co Galway, where he is currently rewilding bogland.
But politics for me right now isn’t on the radar. I’ve a very young family. It seems to be a job that takes a lot out of you
The last time we spoke in an interview context, Ní Shúilleabháin was coming forward to reveal a shocking, prolonged period of sexual harassment by a colleague at UCD, which persisted for two years after she first reported it to college authorities. She told of how Prof Hans-Benjamin Braun had regularly shown up at her office to ask her out, and made persistent phone calls. On one occasion he followed her to a hotel in Cork where she was staying and was removed by gardaí.
The experience was compounded by the college’s failure to address the situation adequately, something UCD’s acting president Prof Mark Rogers acknowledged in a letter of formal apology to her just before Christmas, in which he admitted that Ní Shúilleabháin had not been appropriately supported to pursue a formal complaint at the time.
“That interview led to a lot of different things,” she says. “It was unfortunate that it needed to be done, but it did lead to a lot of changes in UCD, and I think across other institutions as well. I was glad to see that change happen because my whole reasoning behind it was that I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else. Hopefully that will be the case. It was important for me to get a formal apology, to close the door on it.” She now feels she can “walk away” from that period of her life.
The formal apology, she says, was important to her too because she “didn’t want a suggestion out there that I hadn’t followed procedure, that I hadn’t done the right thing, or that I had spoken publicly about it for the wrong reasons”.
With this level of personal interrogation, is she not being too hard on herself? “Yeah? Hmm. I guess I have been in the public eye, by accident or not, since I was 22 with the Rose of Tralee,” which Ní Shúilleabháin won in 2005. “With that, you get another insight into how media works, how perceptions might be. I don’t know why that’s important, but it is to me. Maybe this is the scientist in me, or maybe it’s because I’m from small-town rural Ireland, and you just want to make sure people have the right story… To be honest, I had some people contact me about what solicitor I had used, or how much compensation I had got. I didn’t have a solicitor, because it was a criminal case. I didn’t ask for any compensation, because I wanted to be able to stand over it from an ethical standpoint, a moral standpoint.”
A career in politics seems like an obvious trajectory for Ní Shúilleabháin. She is a down-to-earth sort, gets on with everyone, astute, and fluent in policy, particularly when it comes to education. She says she was “briefly” a member of the Green Party, but had already left before the Citizens’ Assembly.
“I have always wanted to impact policy,” she says. “It’s actually why I left teaching and went to do a PhD. I feel very privileged that I have had an opportunity to do that in the education sphere, and now in an environmental sphere, which I never thought I’d have before. It’s something I find very rewarding.
“I feel like it’s the way I can contribute to wider society, and we should all be thinking about how we can effect and implement change – be that in a local group or wider community. But politics for me right now isn’t on the radar. I’ve a very young family. It seems to be a job that takes a lot out of you. I think there should be more women in politics and in decision-making roles. There should obviously be more people from backgrounds representing all our communities. But for me, right now, it doesn’t seem like a viable option.”
It’s really important to join a union… It’s just much better to be part of a collective rather than try and go it alone
On the broader systemic changes that need to be made in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises, Ní Shúilleabháin says, “People start to get afraid when you talk about having to change our systems and move away from capitalism. The way I think about it is, this is just taking a step back a generation. If you think back to your grandparents’ time, you don’t buy something unless you’re going to use it. If you buy something, you buy it of a good quality so you get lots of use out of it. If that’s in terms of fast fashion, plastic toys, your coffee cup, we can all make changes… It’s about us being thoughtful. But this goes back to education, not just in school, but in a public sense.”
I ask her what she learned about herself during the pandemic. “Eh, that I’m not a nice person to live with 24 hours a day? For sure! All I can remember is going for walks three times a day. We [she and her husband] had a one-year-old, we were both trying to work, and we were taking everything in two-hour shifts. It was intense. It was stressful. I think I learned that I need social interaction.”
At the time, she was living in Inchicore in Dublin 8. “I learned that I need to be in nature. We had the War Memorial Gardens close by and that was a lifesaver. It did teach me to slow down. It was a necessity. It’s better not to be frantically busy the whole time. Now, I say that, and I feel frantically busy now.”
At the end of the conversation, she makes one final point. “It’s really important to join a union… It’s just much better to be part of a collective rather than try and go it alone. It can be done, but it makes it more difficult. It’s important that people consider joining a union.”
At peace in this quiet, green part of Dublin, pointing out how much oxygen one of the nearby redwoods produces in a year, saying it sharpens the mind as to how many trees we all need to breathe clean air, she remarks, “You know, I never come out here alone, I’m always with the boys. I should do that. We all need that.”
