Colin Sheridan: We need a national tree strategy

European countries boast an average 35% forest cover yet Ireland stands at a disgraceful 11%; much of our country is as barren as the Sierra Nevada  

Contrary to popular belief, trees grow well in the west of Ireland if given a chance, like here in Connemara. Picture: Pádraic Fogarty

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.” 

 — Kahlil Gibran 

Trees. Who’d be one? Especially in Ireland. Stand still minding your own business for a couple hundred years, then boom. A generational storm takes you out and does you over.

Doesn’t even buy you dinner first. Not only that, but after centuries of children climbing on you, of emitting oxygen, of absorbing odours and pollutant gases, you’re suddenly the bad guy. 

Through no fault of your own you fall in a certain direction, take out a few overhead wires and before you know it, you’re firewood. 

All those metaphors about strength, nature, and harmony. All for naught.

If you were out of Ireland for the storm and just came back, I bet you’d suddenly develop a newfound appreciation for trees. 

We take them for granted when they’re standing tall minding their own business, but when they’re felled indiscriminately, their gargantuan trunks snapped like virtual twigs, you realise their majesty and start to reconsider their purpose. 

You might also suddenly wonder, why are there so few of them?

There was a time apparently, albeit many thousands of years ago, that a squirrel could hop from one side of this island to another without its tiny little feet ever touching the ground; 80% of the country was covered in native trees.

Now, when you get a bus from the airport to Galway, say, and spend the journey looking out the window, you’re struck not by how green this famously green country is, but how utterly barren it has become. 

You could almost count the number of trees you see. Notwithstanding the winter purge of foliage, the N4 that runs east/west splits an arid plain that, when you pay attention to it, is utterly startling.

Connemara — one of my favourite places to visit in Ireland — is worse. 

A recent day trip had one of my kids ask a question I’d never thought of asking myself despite a lifetime of visiting the place: Where are all the trees?

It is of course beautiful and desolate and — you could mistakenly think — an untouched wilderness. 

But even to the most ignorant eye, its nakedness is startling in the context of it also being one of the wettest places on planet earth. Why does nothing grow there?

Country deforested by settler landlords

We can’t blame everything on the English, but when it comes to the decline of many of our native trees, they’re certainly as guilty as anyone else. 

From about the mid 1500s, as the policy of land theft and plantations gathered momentum, the settler landlords deforested the land they stole in order to cultivate it for agriculture.

The plantation period pre-empted a four-fold increase in the country’s population between 1700 and the mid-1800s, meaning the demand for agriculture was greater. 

While another gift from the Crown — the forced starvation of 1845 to 1852 — corrected the sudden population boom by decreasing it by a whopping 25%, the damage to the land had been done, and we’ve never really recovered.

I grew up in rural Ireland surrounded by farms and farmers. I understand and appreciate the obsession with agriculture and our subsequent reliance on it. 

We cut turf, too — not for fun — but to warm cold houses through tough winter months. 

Many of the thousands of people left without power since Storm Èowyn would’ve had literally no way of heating their homes were it not for the turf and timber they were lucky enough to have access to burn.

But it has become obvious we live in a country that is increasingly barren.

Learned people like Eoghan Daltun have been saying it for years, but — if I’m anything to go by — we’ve all been too distracted to notice.

This country by climate is more like Sweden than Spain, yet a single journey from east to west without a mobile phone to distract you is all you need to realise much of our country is as barren as the Sierra Nevada. 

European countries boast an average 35% forest cover. Ireland stands at a disgraceful 11%. 

From space we must look like Telly Savalas on a packed flight home from Turkey.

More trees — and the right trees — and less data centres might be a start, given the electricity demands the latter places on our struggling environment, and the actual oxygen the former provides. 

Regrowing our native trees is much less profitable as they take longer to grow and harvest, but perhaps it’s time we concentrate less on the bottom line and more on the actual future.

A society grows great, the saying goes, when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. 

We need a national tree strategy. We need a minister for trees. 

And we really need to grow up and understand there are many many people in this world who would give a lot to live in a country as wet and fertile as ours.

 Why are we wasting it?