Hedgerows a vital part of landscape

Donal Hickey on why we should protect our hedges.

THE question of who is responsible for cutting roadside hedges is causing controversy in some parts of the country, with the key issue being whether it is the legal duty of landowners, or the local authority? People in rural areas are continually giving out about untrimmed hedges and trees that become traffic hazards as they obscure views and sometimes force drivers onto the middle of the road, if not onto the incorrect side.

And, of course, that immediately brings us to the vexed question of compensation. There have been cases were landowners have been successfully sued after people being killed, or injured, by trees falling from their property. There’s also the environmental role of hedgerows in relation to plant and wildlife, but more about that anon.

You don’t have to go any further than the neighbouring counties of Cork and Kerry to find policy differences in relation to roadside hedge trimming. Cork County Council cuts the hedges, but Kerry County Council does not, as former Kerry mayor Michael Healy-Rae highlighted at a recent meeting of the Kerry local authority.

Hitting out at the ‘disgraceful state’ of hedges growing out on roads, he called on senior management to cut all hedges as part of general road maintenance. However, Kerry county manager Tom Curran was adamant that responsibility for hedge cutting along a public road, under the Roads Act 1993, “rests completely” with the landowner.

Nor was Mr Curran in any mood for making exceptions, except in a very limited way when work had to be carried out by the council at junctions for safety reasons.

“I will not authorise this council to spend public money where we cannot spend public money. There are better places where I can spent this money and I will not waste money on an issue like this when money is going to be very, very tight over the next few years,” he stated.

Mr Curran estimated the cost of cutting around 9,000km of hedgerow in Kerry at €750,000.

This year the council sent letters to around 7,000 landowners in Kerry asking them to cut their hedges, followed up with a further 96 notices which were acted upon by landowners. “It is clear from these figures that the majority of landowners take their responsibilities seriously and comply with the law,” Mr Curran said.

Something that’s often overlooked is that farmers receiving payments under the REPS scheme are obliged to keep their hedges trimmed.

There is something councils might look at it, however. It’s the way hedges are trimmed — a job that can be carried out in an extremely crude manner, causing unnecessary damage to trees and plant life generally.

At one time people used slashers and billhooks to trim hedges, but modern cutting machinery now used for maintenance can cause massive destruction. All too often hedgerows and ditches are often taken for granted, to the extent that an important part of the landscape has been seriously damaged, or allowed disappear, with very little thought of the results of such actions.

Almost 30 mammals and up to nine species of bats live in, or near, our hedgerows, but concerns have been raised about the continuing removal of such habitat to make way for housing, roads and changing farm practices.

But thousands of kilometres of hedgerows that had been relatively undisturbed for hundreds of years were obliterated over the past 30 to 40 years, with serious consequences for Irish wildlife.

Bird nesting is an obvious activity. Hedges provide food for beetles and snails and berries and seeds for birds. Other dwellers include badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits and field mice. A badger survey in the early 1990’s found that old earthen embankments were a favoured location for badger setts. Eels can also be found in drains and little streams beside hedgerows — creatures that migrate all the way across the Atlantic and through the Gulf of Mexico before finding their way back here again.

A survey in 1985 found that hedgerows covered 1.5% of Ireland, more than the figure for high forest at that time. However, huge developments in roads and housing, especially, have taken place since then.

Hedgerow removal has, according to ornithologists in Britain, been responsible to a large degree for the decline in certain bird species in recent years. As two-thirds of bird species found in Ireland nest in hedgerows, a drop in population is also felt here in the wake of rampant hedgerow destruction.

The Irish landscape is still relatively unique. One of the first things that often strikes people when they go abroad is the absence of hedgerows and how monotonous the landscape can be without such defining features. Hard to imagine Ireland without ditches and hedgerows!