Where eagles dare – if ony the the cowardly poisoners would give them a flying chance
But let’s not pussyfoot around with legal niceties or political correctness – prior to the eagles’ deaths, farmers had publicly threatened to kill these magnificent birds if they were released into the wild.
And they’ve carried out their threat – throughout the four provinces, more than a dozen of the 20 Norwegian eagles released in Munster are now corpses. Two red kites and three peregrine falcons have also been destroyed.
The time-consuming programmes to reintroduce the golden and white-tailed eagles were designed to replace the eagles driven to extinction by farmers at the turn of the 20th century. Back then, the farmers used shotguns to do their dirty work. Today, the same anonymous cowards have achieved the same result using poison, only because this mode of eradication avoids troublesome legal repercussions.
In Norway, sheep farmers and their stock coexist harmoniously with the country’s 3,000 eagles; incidents of eagles taking lambs are virtually unknown.
Similarly in Scotland and central Europe where eagles have become major tourist attractions. Irish farmers, obvious experts in ornithology and the dietary habits of raptors, have taken it upon themselves to eradicate a beautiful part of my – and your – natural heritage.
Will the IFA publicly condemn the guilty parties and hand them over to the gardaí? I’ll bet you know the answer to that one.
This is a further example of powerful social and economic groups ignoring the country’s laws and riding roughshod over the democratic wishes of the majority of its citizens. The IFA claims farmers are the real custodians of Ireland’s environment. They must be having a laugh. Since entering the EEC in 1973 – when the cost of all meat quadrupled overnight – Irish farmers have received their lion’s share of the billions of euro annually paid out by the EU to its farmers. Last year that came to an eye-watering €48 billion. Ireland’s eagle-killers receive their large cheques by post from Brussel, where only the flimsiest of checks are ever carried out on the farmers’ invoices.
Today the price Irish citizens pay for all agricultural produce is inflated by 26%; these extra taxes are simply redirected into farmers’ pockets.
As the poisoning of these eagles demonstrates, the alacrity with which farmers avail themselves of these huge handouts has never been matched by a genuine responsibility in protecting our wildlife. Let’s examine other contributions these “environmental custodians” have made:
1. 74% of the pollution of Ireland’s waterways is due to farming. (EU figures, not mine.)
2. Non-urban contamination of drinking water supplies by pathogens, eg, epidemics caused by e-coli, cryptosporidium, giardia etc., is invariably due to farming effluents. Each newly-born calf releases 20 billion cryptosporidia (that’s not a misprint – that’s into the environment during its first week of life). If you’re currently boiling your water before drinking it or buying bottled water because you don’t trust your house supply, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s because of agricultural pathogens. Don’t forget that when Tuam’s drinking water was destroyed by farming effluents, it cost (in today’s figures) €60 million to replace. Who coughed up this huge sum? Yes, you the taxpayer.
3. The majority of fish kills are due to farming practices .
4. Salmon farming has been a major cause in the drastic reduction of both salmon and sea-trout stocks in freshwaters of the west and south-west.
5. Farming practices are directly responsible for the alarming decline in wildfowl, corncrake, curlew and plover numbers, and for the decline in populations of many songbirds.
6. With barbed wire, steel fence and legal threats, many farmers brazenly and illegally block access to some of Ireland’s most scenic area, actions that in any other civilised country would promptly land the offending farmer in jail. These actions are responsible for Ireland being the only EU country boasting a marked decrease in walking holidays.
The traditional esteem that farmers enjoyed in many Irish hearts and minds has evaporated – it has been replaced by disgust. If the eagle-killers were so concerned at the potential loss of a sporadic lamb, they could have been easily recompensed by tapping into their generous subsidies or, better still, the IFA could’ve dipped into its own overflowing coffers. Numerous other bodies would have been happy to help – the departments of Agriculture and the Environment, Bord Failte, etc – and if these farmers felt so threatened with bankruptcy by the eagles’ presence, I would have gladly sent them a cheque to cover any lamb loss.
After 30 years of fighting to protect Ireland’s environment and now witnessing this carnage wrought by eagle-killing barbarians, I’m forced to concur with James Joyce’s prediction – no matter what, Ireland will always revert to being the sow that eats her own piglets.
Dr Roderick D O’Sullivan
Devonshire Place
London WIG 6HP
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