Eoghan Daltun: Ireland should be a rainforest nation — so why isn't it?
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Here in Ireland we’re all given to complaining about the amount of rain we get. But there’s a spin-off, still largely unknown, to our wet climate: before our ancestors cleared it, much, and very probably most, of this island was rainforest.
Hearing the word ‘rainforest’ conjures images of dense, steamy jungles in the Amazon, Congo, or South East Asia, and it’s true: most of the world’s rainforests are in the tropics. But there’s another type: temperate rainforest, and that’s exactly what once covered a lot of Ireland. The thing that defines any sort of rainforest, anywhere on the planet, is the abundant presence of what are called epiphytes. These are plants that grow on other plants such as trees, but are not rooted in the ground, hence excluding ivy or honeysuckle, for example. And in a tropical rainforest you’ll likely see plenty of bromeliads, orchids, and other growths, living on the trunks and branches of the trees.
Epiphytes, and hence rainforests, can only survive in areas with high levels of rainfall, and Ireland certainly isn’t lacking in that department. But perhaps even more important than the amount of water that falls from the sky is the annual number of ‘wet days’: days in which more than 1mm of precipitation arrives in some shape or form. In places like West Cork, where I live, these average out at more than 200 per year. Every sort of aerial moisture helps to create the conditions for rainforest, including drizzle, fog, mist, and sleet.
But temperate rainforest is rare compared to its tropical equivalent. Before farming, it probably covered something like one-tenth of the global area of tropical rainforest. And for a long time, agriculture was largely concentrated in the temperate zones, so until recently temperate rainforests were far more drastically cleared for farming. (That has changed radically over the last 50 years or so, of course, with tropical forests now also being devastated.) The result is that they now only exist in small pockets here and there globally.
That is also very much the case here in Ireland, where natural forest cover has dropped from an estimated 80% or so down to only 1.5%. While many of us were taught to blame the English for this state of affairs, that’s only one side of the story. The truth is that the vast majority of the forests were already gone by the 17th century when English military supremacy was fully established following the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, and later reinforced mid-century in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest. But this period did see the rapid annihilation by the colonising power of almost all of what was left.
The terrible consequence is that less than 0.1% (one-thousandth) of Ireland is now covered by ancient woodland, where trees are known to have existed since at least 1660. And none of even these tiny fragments is anything close to what might be called ‘pristine’, or ‘primeval’ forest: all have been heavily exploited for timber and other resources over millennia, and most are ecologically wrecked, overgrazed by sheep, invasive sika/fallow deer, or feral goats, and infested with rhododendron or other invasive non-native plants.
As I outlined last week, I discovered in the most personal way just how incredibly rich and beautiful an Irish temperate rainforest can be through ecologically restoring exactly this habitat on the farm I bought in 2009 on the Beara Peninsula. Now, walking in the forest is like entering a dream world, brimming with life, shafts of sunlight penetrating down though the canopy above to illuminate a fantastic diversity of plants and buzzing insects. And while I very quickly began to realise that what I had wasn’t merely native forest, but rainforest, for a long time I was reluctant to trumpet that. How could it be possible that I had happened on something that virtually nobody else was saying?
It’s beyond extraordinary that here in Ireland a massively important part of our heritage has been, and continues to be, ignored and allowed to dwindle and die away, as is currently the case with our last pieces of rainforest. It really is as though countless unique artifacts like the Ardagh Chalice were daily being thrown into a giant crusher, and barely anyone was aware of the situation, and almost nothing was being done about it. But I have been hugely encouraged by the incredible reaction to my recently published book on the subject, with innumerable letters, emails, texts, and phone calls from people all over the country wanting to know how they can do more for nature. (To my great regret, I simply don’t have time to reply to most of them, for which I do apologise.)
One of the biggest difficulties we face on this island is that nature is so very severely depleted that people really don’t know what a truly wild place looks or feels like, at least not in an Irish context. We have nothing along the lines of Yellowstone National Park or the Serengeti to remind us, since our own national parks are all ecologically wrecked, pale shadows of what they could be. So nature to us is the few species that have somehow managed to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. Wilderness is an abstract concept, something that exists in other parts of the world, not here. But it absolutely doesn’t need to stay that way.
How, for example, could we bring our rainforest cover back up to decent levels nationally? People love planting trees, but there’s a far, far better way: to let existing pockets of rainforest expand back out naturally by reducing grazing pressures, allowing trees to self-seed into surrounding areas. That way, the entire ecosystem grows: not just trees, but all the associated ground flora, insects, fungi, lichens, mammals, the whole shebang.
What on Earth (literally) are we waiting for?
- If you’re interested in learning more, you can read all about it in my book,, published last September. Also, find me on Twitter and Instagram under @IrishRainforest.
- Anja Murray is away this week