Swampy tale that could help us out of a morass

Dunhill Ecopark is a hive of small enterprises sharing facilities, knowledge and networks. And the surrounding Anne river catchment, from the Comeragh foothills down to the sea at Annestown, has been the site of equally remarkable co-operation between farming neighbours.

Both stories are linked by an innovative approach to the relationship between agriculture, industry, built infrastructure and the environment in the form of a series of “integrated constructed wetlands” that help purify the valley’s wastewater.

Dr Senan Cooke, one of the live wires behind the ecopark, gives great credit to community groups, especially the local GAA, for supporting the park’s development. The many team photographs that line its public corridors bear out his view.

The linking wetlands project can, however, certainly be traced to a single individual: Dr Rory Harrington, a local resident who is one of the most remarkable figures in Irish environmental science.

But Harrington says in turn that the scheme owes its success to the support of other individuals, among them the late Éamon de Buitléar, and from a range of institutions, including the Heritage Council, the Forest Service, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, two EU programmes and Waterford County Council. Above all, he acknowledges his neighbouring fellow farmers and Dunhill residents.

All of them took a considerable risk, whether in funding the project from afar or in ceding precious agricultural hectares to zones of “unproductive” rushes, sedges and water. Harrington bases his integrated constructed wetlands on hard science, and they are therefore experimental by definition. Much of the Anne river catchment area has become an open-air ecological laboratory.

'Dirty drain'
For many years the Anne was hardly a thing of beauty or a source of environmental health. In the early 1990s it was described by Inland Fisheries Ireland as a "dirty drain". This is a very gently sloping valley, and the stream – it's hardly a river, even today – meandered slowly, often invisible under thick vegetation, through largely abandoned bottomlands.

Edmund Dunphy, one of the first two farmers to participate in the project, back in 1996, remembers how his farmyard washings – a euphemism for the liquefied excrement of his beef and dairy herds – would flow down a drain he had cut towards this tangled wasteland.

“We pushed everything down to the bog,” he says wryly, “and it half cured itself.” As volumes increased, however, the drain began to back up.

The prospect of installing water-purification machinery, or paying tankers to take the washings off his hands, was financially daunting. So was the prospect of fines under tightening pollution regulation. He knew he had a problem.

A couple of kilometres downstream Harrington, who combines his scientific career with farming deer with his wife, Helena, and five children, had similar problems.

But he also had more than the glimmer of a solution. His core idea was beautifully simple. Wetland plants filter the many toxins out of dirty water, consuming them harmlessly as nutrients. He began to test constructed wetland “cells”, planted with appropriate rushes and sedges, in purifying his own run-off and domestic waste, combined with riverside plantations of trees, such as willow and alder, that don’t mind getting their feet wet.

This work involved reshaping the stream itself, expanding it into relatively broad expanses of water, and controlling its flow – to a degree – through grading slopes down the valley.

Harrington’s method is closer to ecological engineering than to ecological restoration. He was not attempting to revive former ecosystem dynamics or specific wetland plant and animal communities.

He was, and is, constructing something new here, with the main aim of purifying water. But his ambition was broad, and he talks today of reanimating the catchment.

To his delight he found that species long absent, such as trout, otter and even salmon, have now returned. Increased biodiversity is indeed one of the multiple benefits of integrated constructed wetlands. So, he says, is an aesthetic quality he describes as “landscape fit”.

From the beginning, however, he first had to bring his neighbours onside. He stresses the importance of personal relationships and trust in environmental issues.

But why would any farmer give up several hectares of land, some of which was once productive, for a scheme like this? “I have faith in Rory,” says Dunphy. “He’s a great talker.” (This is an understatement.)

“We had tried to reclaim some of the bottomland,” Dunphy continues, “and it hadn’t worked. And I was worried that we would have a big pollution incident.

“I could have put in tanks and pumps. It would have cost 10 times more and would not have been as good. There has been a change in the direction of our thinking, and we can see it working every day.”

Ducks and waterhens
Dunphy is not only pleased with the economic benefits: he now enjoys evening walks through his new wetlands. "There is wildlife down there we hadn't seen before, ducks and waterhens. Probably lots of small things we haven't noticed yet. There wasn't room for them before."

Thirteen other farmers, most of them along the catchment, have followed suit. This community has both embraced an innovative future and revived the old collaborative ethos of meitheal.

Today integrated constructed wetlands also purge domestic effluent from the village and industrial effluent from the ecopark, in both cases creating attractive public parks as spin-offs.

All this raises a central question: why has this project not been replicated more elsewhere? In fact, there are now integrated constructed wetlands in a number of other places, and integrated-constructed-wetland guidelines published by the Department of the Environment in 2010 draw heavily on Harrington’s work.

But nowhere is an integrated-constructed-wetland scheme so advanced, or so integrated, as here. And “integrated” sums up Harrington’s approach. It applies to the ecological side, of course, integrating factors from hydrology to vegetation. And it applies to the human side – not only linkages between neighbours but also “joined-up approaches”, a favourite phrase of Harrington’s, across the barriers of different disciplines and bureaucracies.

For those who would like to see a better Ireland rise from the morass we have landed ourselves in, the Anne Valley experience could be inspirational, from many perspectives.

“There is no limit,” as the motto on the cafe wall at Dunhill Ecopark tells us, “to what can be achieved by a community working together.”

dunhillecopark.com