Killarney’s dying rainforest: A towering national disgrace for more than 50 years

'For more than 50 years, nothing has been done to alter the decline'

Left: severe overgrazing in Killarney National Park. Right: a healthy, non-overgrazed native rainforest - in West Cork Pictures: Eoghan Daltun

I have on my shelf a book titled Wild Ireland, edited by the great Irish naturalist Éamon de Buitléar. On page 63, there’s an image of Tomies Wood in Killarney National Park, showing a stark contrast between two sides of a fence: one untouched by sika deer and other grazers, full of regenerating native trees and flora, and utter desolation outside.

Wild Ireland was published in 1984, 40 years ago. But we know that, more than a decade before, in the early 1970s, ecologists were already flagging both the severe damage overgrazing was doing in the park, and the closely related problem of invasion by Rhododendron ponticum. Given that over half a century has since passed, that Killarney is easily Ireland’s most important surviving fragment of native forest, and that it’s in the ‘care’ of the State, these issues must surely have been resolved by now, you might reasonably imagine?