Vicious gulls just trying to protect young

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.

Like us, they protect their young from perceived danger and source food when hunger hits. Yet, natural and instinctive as that behaviour might be, when it comes to the humble seagull, it’s being used as a stick with which to conduct a chorus of gull-culling enthusiasts.

To find the source of this tragicomic farce, we have to gaze skyward, to the lofty heights of the upper house of the Oireachtas. As it was there, in the traditional nesting place of some of Ireland’s finest intellectuals — many of whom narrowly escaped the fate of singing their own swan song following the closely-fought abolition of the Seanad referendum in 2013 — that Senator Denis O’Donovan’s recent call to reopen a conversation about gull- culling, divided the nation.