Hunting club gets permission to challenge minister

A HUNTING club yesterday obtained High Court permission to challenge a decision by Environment Minister John Gormley to put restrictions on its licence to hunt deer, which it says amounts to an effective ban.

The Ward Union Hunt Club chairman Oliver Russell claims the Green Party’s minister’s decision is “purely based on his political philosophy that hunting should be prohibited”.

The minister is contriving new conditions in the hunting licence “to give the appearance of permitting hunting whilst in reality banning it”, claimed Mr Russell.

The club, which has 128 members, holds hunts in the north county Dublin/south Meath area, involving a deer being released and chased by hounds until it (deer) goes “to bay” and is recaptured by shooting a sedative into the animal.

The Ward Union has received licences to hunt for 23 years since 1976 on the basis of a pack of hounds pursuing a deer, said Mr Russell.

But last year, when Mr Gormley became minister, the licence included a condition that the hounds could not be released until the deer has been recaptured.

This condition, Mr Russell said, has “in effect banned hunting”.

The notion that hounds could only be released after the deer has been recaptured makes a hunt impossible or nearly impossible because by the time the dogs are out, the scent of the deer will have become faint or faded, he said.

Last February, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) indicated re-issuing of the licence would be very difficult because of an incident the previous month when a hunted deer crossed the yard of a school in Co Meath.

As a result, the Ward Union implemented a code of practice for its hunts, but by August last year, its licence had not been renewed.

The minister had expressed concern about public safety and the welfare of the stags used in the hunts which was a “manifest for the banning of the hunting of deer”, said Mr Russell.

The club had its St Stephen’s Day hunt under the new licence but “the whole process was bizarre and a farce,” said Mr Russell.

The deer was “lost” because even the club’s best riders were unable to keep up with it and the hounds could not be released in order to find it.

Mr Russell said the 120 riders there on the day got “a mere 10- to 15-minute cross-country ride without any sense of purpose” and it confirmed the licence meant hunting could not be carried out in any meaningful way. As a result, the club voted to suspend hunting until “such time as the situation has been regularised”.

Yesterday, Mr Justice John Hedigan gave leave for the club to seek a judicial review quashing the minister’s decision to impose conditions on the licence. The judge was told the club would apply to take injunction proceedings preventing the minister from continuing to impose the condition on the licence.