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.