Greens move in for stag-hunting kill

Co Meath’s Ward Union Hunt, the target of John Gormley’s projected stag-hunting ban, has the support of large numbers of country people, but it is unlikely to persuade Fianna Fáil TDs to vote against the Government

IT HAS BEEN a long time coming, but finally the members of the Ward Union Hunt have closed in on their quarry. After four hours of chasing through fallow land and thinned hedgerows and across the rivers and streams of north Co Meath, the stag is pinned behind a wall.

It is almost dark. The horses and the hounds have gone home leaving about half a dozen men on foot to round up the stag by diving on him and holding him down until the trailer arrives. Then the hunt will be over.

Stags are often tired at this stage. It is called “lying up”, but, more accurately, it means lying in a ditch. However, this impressive creature is more than a match for his human pursuers. Just as they near, he vaults a wall into a garden, and then another one, and emerges on to the main road. He turns left and trots briskly into the nearest field. His pursuers give up. He is now an “outlier”, free to roam where he will for the time being.

Four hours earlier, the hunt was setting off from outside Jack Quinn’s pub in Scurlogstown, near Trim.

It’s a week day in December, and the car park is full of horse boxes and 4x4s, but at least the mud indicates that these are working vehicles. Despite the season, the hunt is up to its full complement of 50 horses and their riders and about the same again who will follow it around the countryside. Jockey Paul Carberry, who grew up with the hunt, is with them.

There is a painting of the hunt from the 19th century, taken outside the same pub. The roof is thatched. They have been doing this for 155 years. But if the Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, has his way, this hunt season will be the last. It says so in three little words in the revised programme for government agreed in October. On page 24, under the headline “animal welfare”, it says “ban stag-hunting”. By banning stag-hunting, the Government means banning the Ward Union Hunt, based in Dunshaughlin, Co Meath, the only stag hunt in the country.

The provision has sat there like a furtive time bomb since October. The hunt itself and the wider hunting fraternity kept a judicious silence until now, figuring that the Government had other priorities, such as the Lisbon Treaty, Nama and the Budget. The banning of the stag hunt got little attention until this week, when the Ward Union Hunt decided to mobilise by holding a “monster rally” in the Trim Castle Hotel last Monday.

Protest organisers are never given to underestimate expected turnouts, but for once their estimate of 1,000 people proved to be accurate. A cheer went up when it was announced from the podium that the legendary, recently retired, flat jockey Mick Kinane had turned up but was in another room because of the size of the crowd. The atmosphere was febrile and the targets were the Green Party and its leader, John Gormley.

The tone was set by the editor of the Irish Farmers Journal, Matt Dempsey, who is a former Kildare hunt chairman. The Green Party should be at "ease with farming and the countryside", he said, but instead it was a "malign influence". His contention that there were more people in the room than there would be at a Green convention was cheered.

Even more strident was the normally urbane Dragons' Denbusinessman and well-known hunt supporter, Gavin Duffy. The Green Party had a "fixation with our way of life" and was full of vegans who would stop at nothing to stop all forms of hunting.

A former Fianna Fáil chairman of Meath County Council, Cllr Nick Killian, said he was “ashamed” of his party for signing up to new legislation. Fine Gael TD Shane McEntee said he had refused to vote for a Green Party motion when they were in opposition, telling the party whip “I will in my arse”.

It was uncomfortable listening for the three Fianna Fáil TDs who turned up, North Dublin TDs Michael Kennedy and Darragh O’Brien and Meath East TD Thomas Byrne. Kennedy took umbrage when a speaker taunted the other two about their struggle to get elected.

“If we didn’t support you, we wouldn’t be here. I want to emphasise this – insulting TDs and ministers is not the way to achieve your aim,” he said.

Thomas Byrne accused Gavin Duffy of attempting to belittle him by suggesting he was a promising politician who’d better get on the right side of the argument. Duffy apologised. Conspicuous by his absence was the Trim-based Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, who was one of the negotiators of the revised programme for government.

“I’m a lifelong supporter of Fianna Fáil. I live 300 yards from Noel Dempsey’s house. He has not graced me with a reply to any of my e-mails,” said John Norton, the joint master of the Westmeath Beagles, to loud applause.

The feeling was universal that the Ward Union Hunt looked like low-lying fruit for the Green Party. Fianna Fáil’s rural backbenchers would never countenance a ban on fox-hunting or coursing, but they could just about live with a ban on a single hunt. Why else would the Greens want a ban on the only hunt that does not kill its quarry? Or so the reasoning went.

Unfortunately for the hunt, an incident occurred last Friday week which will only strengthen Gormley’s view that it should be banned. At 1.30pm a stag collided with the windscreen of a car on the Slane-to- Ashbourne road near Ashbourne. The animal broke a leg and was put down. Speaking from Copenhagen, Gormley said that he had first been prompted to act when a stag ran into a schoolyard in Kildalkey, Co Meath, three years ago, leading to complaints from local parents.

Ward Union Hunt chairman Christy Reynolds said the recent incident was the first time in six years that a stag had had to be put down following a hunt, but the timing was hardly propitious. Gormley said his primary concern was not animal welfare, but safety. Two years ago he issued a restricted licence to the hunt to turn it effectively from a stag hunt into a cruelty-free “drag hunt”, which means that the stag is used to release a scent trail, but is then recaptured before the hunt can begin. The licence was rejected by the Ward Union Hunt because the thrill of the hunt is the pursuit of the animal, which lends an air of unpredictability to proceedings. “You might as well be pony-trekking in Glendalough otherwise,” said William Murphy, who comes from a long line of hunters. The hunt successfully sued the Minister. Gormley then said the High Court case left him with no option but to ban the hunt completely.

“How could I live with myself if there was a very serious accident when there are clearly safety issues involved?” he said. “I have been pretty clear from the outset that our primary concern in relation to the stag hunt is our safety concern. We have had a number of incidents where we have had the stag going out into urbanised area with high levels of traffic. I have heard from a reliable source that the deer jumped out in front of a woman who was pushing a pram.”

Gormley said the Ward Hunt Union had engaged in a “certain amount of triumphalism” in relation to the High Court action. He said reports that banning stag-hunting would be the thin edge of the wedge were “absolute nonsense”.

“There is no difficulty with angling, shooting or with point-to-point, nor is there any political agreement around hare-coursing or fox-hunting. That is just an attempt to scaremonger and demonise.”

He said that the legislation was with the parliamentary draftsman and would be ready early in the New Year.

The exact contours of a protest campaign are still being worked out, but the strength of the turnout from all over the country has convinced the hunt that it has a lobby group of 300,000 people on its side who are either directly or indirectly involved in hunting.

A campaign of lobbying rural Fianna Fáil TDs has begun, and there is talk of a march from Phoenix Park to the Dáil and even of exploiting the Green Party’s democratic nature as a party by joining en masse.

Hunting people are not natural agitators and they fear that this will mean the legislation gets pushed through without resistance. “We’ve been too decent too long,” said one speaker echoing a common theme.

Whatever the strength of feeling, there is no realistic prospect that Fianna Fáil politicians will bring down the Government on this issue. Thomas Byrne said he “unequivocally” supported the Ward Hunt Union, but used the same word to describe his support for the Government.

Nevertheless, it could be an uncomfortable few months for the Coalition partners, given the strength of feeling on both sides. As Albert Reynolds famously said: “You get over the big hurdles and it’s the small ones that trip you up.”