OPINION: To protect the natural environment, greater action is needed, like banning all fire-driven land clearance methods, outlawing all forms of live hunting, including hare coursing, stopping State-sponsored snaring and shooting of badgers and adding legal protection to mammals, like the fox, currently not protected under wildlife legislation, writes John Tierney who is campaigns director for the Association of Hunt Saboteurs (pictured left)
‘I am a Firestarter, twisted Firestarter,‘ is a line from a song by UK band, Prodigy. One can see landowners in Kerry and west Cork raving in the flame light as this thumping electronic punk track echoes across the hillside downing out the screams of wildlife caught in a hot and smoky gorse furnace of death.
The rush to burn before March 1st every year takes no account of conservation, wildlife and community. The match hand does its work while the other hand displays a one-finger gesture to society.
Pictures: Valerie O’Sullivan
The Janus approach, where land clearing by burning is legal within a defined season but no landowner is willing to be identified in engaging in this practice, is telling. Having destroyed habitat, killed wildlife and caused social disruption, now is not the time for a landowner to say, ‘I did that’.
As for getting justice for the burnt, while the relevant authorities are doing their best, the wheels of justice turn with all the speed of treacle flowing uphill.
Ireland’s conservation of the environment and its biodiversity registers D-minus. The government is trying but A-grade actions are shied away from.
Actions are needed like banning all fire-driven land clearance methods, banning all forms of live hunting, including hare coursing, stopping State-sponsored snaring and shooting of badgers and adding legal protection to mammals, like the fox, currently not protected under wildlife legislation.
Land clearance by fire may appeal to a primitive need to control one’s environment. However, it is out of place in a society that has moved on from loin-cloths and cave dwelling.
Any landowner with a pyromania bent might take an aural note of another Prodigy song, World’s on Fire, and the line, ‘The world’s on fire – and it’s too close to the wire’.
For future firestarters hiding in the gorse bush, put that in your matchbox and leave the red-tops unlit.
The Association of Hunt Saboteurs can be contacted at PO Box 4734, Dublin 1.
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