Irish Examiner view: Time to act

Wild gorse fire on Mount Gabriel, Schull, Co Cork. Picture: Caroline Cronin

The year 2017 was one of the worst in memory for destructive gorse fires, but official warnings of prosecutions and jail and threats of the use of satellite images and drones to catch people in the act of starting illegal fires don’t seem to have quelled people’s enthusiasm for setting them.

In that year some 350 acres of land in the historic Gougane Barra Valley in Co Cork were destroyed, whole swathes of Howth Head in Dublin were damaged, people were moved from their homes near Bray Head in Co Wicklow, while 1,500 hectares of forest and a further 2,000 hectares of bogland in the Cloosh Valley in Connemara were obliterated and the air force had to be called in to try and douse the blaze.

A family of five were left homeless following a gorse fire which destroyed their thatched home in Mayo and it emerged that year that 10 of the State’s local authorities had spent over €1m tackling wildfires.

Year on year since then there have been numerous dangerous wildfires across the country, with Defence Forces personnel, firefighters, and volunteers all having to risk their lives to put them out.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon and has been going on for centuries. But the number of fires that have already necessitated the calling of emergency services this year alone appear to indicate that people are not getting the message.

Already this week, the Mount Gabriel aviation radar facility near Schull, Co Cork, was threatened by a massive blaze and only heroic work by firefighters saved it. 

Indeed, that fire was the largest of 20 gorse or vegetation fires to which all six West Cork fire brigades were called over the past weekend.

Tradition is one thing, but remorseless destruction is quite another and it is now beyond time that the authorities did something about it.