Keep foreigners out of Ireland! - Coping with invasive species

SOME non-native species, animals or plants, represent a huge threat to our natural flora and fauna and the environment that sustains them. 

Victorian collectors and, possibly, the deference accorded to those wealthy enough to travel and bring exotic species back to our shores, have had a considerable and unwelcome impact on the world around us.

Grey squirrels supplanting native reds, Sika deer inter- breeding with diminished stocks of pure, native red deer, mink escaping from fur farms and causing something approaching carnage among ground-nesting birds are some of the issues raised by importing non-native animals. In recent years there have been suggestions that chub have been smuggled into some rivers. If this is the case then native fish stocks are in for a hard time from this predator.

Some plants can have an equally negative impact. Japanese knotweed is so noxious that it has stopped building developments. The various pondweeds choking — and eventually killing maybe — our great lakes were innocently imported. As was the ubiquitous cypress leylandii — the palm tree that never stops growing or stealing light.

The foot-and-mouth scare showed that we are capable of established good biosecurity on our borders. We should extend that vigilance to all non-native species because none of us knows what kind of a Pandora’s box we open by introducing something nature has not established here.