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u/BisonAcceptable1994 Jun 03 '26
Ireland's ecology is a shit show. Fields, fields and more fields. Apparently bees are actually doing better in cities now because at least people grow gardens with some kind of biodiversity in the plants.
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u/Gold-Vacation-169 Jun 03 '26
Problem is, in Ireland most people see fields, fields and fields as beautiful. Its scary.
They see Connemara has untouched wilderness, its anything but. Its a human created wasteland. We cut down the trees and then stopped anymore growing due to thousands of sheep.
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u/ClassGrassMass Jun 03 '26
Worst part is, why tf do we even have so many sheep? Farmers take a fuckton in subsidies, we ruin our environment, destroy actual beauty.. all for what? Farmers that cant even keep their sheep in a field
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u/Porcsinlamaz Jun 03 '26
Best bit in Connemara are those wee lake islands that still have trees on them.
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u/GamingMunster Jun 04 '26
It’s the same in England. Working in archaeology a lot of locals will talk about the wildlife and the green spaces, when agricultural fields are ecological wastelands.
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u/odysseymonkey Jun 03 '26
Totally. People complain about wind turbines to me highlights they haven't a clue what the place used to look like before we killed everything and put little walls everywhere
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u/LWBooser Jun 03 '26
This 100% I love my country but it's sad that people consider it so beautiful when it's almost all artificial (farmland or overgrazed and barren "wilderness")
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u/Yorrins Jun 03 '26
I must admit I do find a view of endless fields beautiful. But I would find a nice forest view beautiful too.
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u/Samhain87 Jun 09 '26
Fuck all trees are capable of growing in connemara because of soil acidity levels. You couldn't have picked a worse example apart from the Burren.
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u/broken_neck_broken Jun 04 '26
The forests are a shit show too. Gorse fires are started by people but they spread because fallen trees are just left to dry out and rot instead of being cleared away. Coillte are an absolute joke!
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u/Pure-Ice5527 Jun 03 '26
I’ve no data other than experience but I’d say that’s true for most insects. The country side is wall to wall mono culture fields for food crops that are sprayed regularly to kill every pest, that’s not happening in urban areas.. if you look at bushes in flower they tend to have a lot of activity in urban areas and a lot less so out in the countryside
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u/MrSnare Jun 04 '26
I do my best in my half acre out the back arse of nowhere but all of the semi-feral cats in the area prowl nearby and prevent any other mammals from living nearby.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 03 '26
All despite a depressingly low population density and no cities thar actually feel like cities.
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u/AdBoring9620 Jun 03 '26
We have trees and plenty of them. Not much in the way of forests,but every rural road and a lot of fields are lined by trees.
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u/PremiumTempus Jun 03 '26
That’s not very special. What country road isn’t lined with trees in a climate similar to ours? It’s the same in most Northern European countries
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26
every rural road
That's literally the one place they shouldn't be though. We're long overdue clearing some space at the sides of our roads, both so drivers can see more than few metres ahead, and so pedestrians can properly move out of the way of said drivers instead of being forced to stay in the lane.
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u/International_Grape7 Jun 03 '26
You add Billionaires buying all the small farms, taking up the hedgerows and it’s even for alarming for our ecology.
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u/litrinw Jun 03 '26
The more depressing thing is that the general public just don't care or worse yet think a green field is peak nature
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u/RobotIcHead Jun 03 '26
It has been improving a lot in recent decades. And before people go blaming the English the majority of deforestation happened before the colonisation happened. The last of the great forest were felled during their rule but the damage had already been done.
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u/cuttlefische Jun 03 '26
It's improving moreso in spite of how things are going. Irish forestry is a complete shitshow.
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u/TheHames72 Jun 03 '26
My grandad loved nothing more than writing excoriating letters to the papers about Coillte. He was one of the first foresters in the Republic, trained in Avonmore.
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u/Iwasapirateonce Jun 03 '26
I wonder if Ash-dieback will counteract the glacial progress in the last 20 years. A lot of Ash trees are dieing in the past few years. Ash also makes up a large % of our mature native woodland cover. Hard to be optimistic given the devastation.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26
No the English do still deserve a large chunk of the blame. We would have lost a lot of forest regardless, but they're the reason we lost almost all of it.
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u/Sciprio Jun 03 '26
And the most trees we have are non-native Sitka trees which are farmed for timber. Ireland is a beautiful country, but it's awfully barren.
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u/DangerX2HighVoltage Jun 03 '26
We could turn this around if we had the political appetite to do so. Unfortunately our politicians are puppets for the corporations
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u/great_guiri Jun 03 '26
Unfortunately the problem is irish people. Nobody cares about this apart from sone middle class novara listening types. The problem is really grim. I gave up pub shite talk about it years ago as people thought i was some weirdo hippy for saying letting fields become forests is a good thing. A neighbour literally screamed at my sister because she had a few trees along the edge of her garden as they looked untidy. I effing kid you not. Blaming pols is too easy, irish people are parochial and deeply conservative
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u/Disastrous-Pea4106 Jun 03 '26
There were some articles going around a while ago, about something like the nature connection index. And wouldn't you know it, we ranked extremely low. It's a self perpetuating cycle. We have poor access to nature, which causes disregard for nature, causing further depriortising, causing further disregard.
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u/DangerX2HighVoltage Jun 03 '26
I’m a dub so I’ve no land but I’d love to have a few acres and turn all but half an acre back into native Irish nature
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u/Much_Thanks3992 Jun 03 '26
Be careful what you wish for!! Changing attitudes to nature would be a better long-term strategy than being at the mercy of politicians and corporations and their greenwashing schemes
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u/zeroconflicthere Jun 03 '26
That's no political appetite because there's no popular appetite.
There's no popular appetite because we do have stunning scenery.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26
We have stunning scenery in a absolute sense, and only in an absolute sense.
Compared to other countries, we're lower mid range.
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u/DangerX2HighVoltage Jun 03 '26
I think there’s absolutely a growing appetite among the population. It’s just not at the levels where it could actually influence politics yet
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u/m1kasa4ckerman Jun 03 '26
We need more reforestation schemes, especially with farmers. And more regulations around farming.
It’s incredibly sad what’s happened with the forests, but this goes back thousands of years likely to our first farmers in Neolithic times. That being said, we can learn from our history and create a better path moving forward.
More trees, more birds, resuscitate the ecosystems, etc. But people need to get on board with letting go of some old ways. More trees, more native flora and fauna, will only benefit us in the short term and the long run. There’s zero reason why we shouldn’t be fighting for this.
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u/lukker- Jun 03 '26
The sheep flock needs to be greatly reduced. They absolutely destroy eco systems at scale. They are unprofitable and are kept going with subsidies. Subsidise rewilding instead.
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u/halibfrisk Jun 03 '26
Ok, now let’s do bogs…
Keep in mind this is a blunt statistic that is often rolled out here. It doesn’t differentiate between native forest habitats, which yes it’s a shame ireland doesn’t have more of, and sitka spruce plantations, which Ireland definitely don’t need more of, and ignores that ~16% of Ireland is covered in bog, which we should absolutely be preserving as much of as we can.
tl:dr remember you’re a bogger
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u/Puzzled-Pudding8939 Jun 03 '26
Whats even worse for me is that almost every inch of Ireland is private property. We can only move on the roads. As soon as you step of a road you are tresspassing. Huuge areas of this small island are just giant fields. If you were droped somewhere random on the island you couldnt say where you are. Everywhere looks the same...
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u/soulpotatoes Jun 03 '26
Vast vast majority of the forest cover is profit plantations, devoid of any life and harmful to the environment. Less than 2% are natural forests (most of these being in small abandoned plots of farmland)
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u/Local_Ticket_4942 Jun 03 '26
it’s so depressing. everywhere i look there’s deadzone spruce plantations where there should be native woodlands bustling with wildlife
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u/JoooneBug Jun 03 '26
Farmers getting handouts for monocultures ruining the land! Ireland is a great country to do business in. Just ask our national forestry agency Coillte
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u/ClaroStar Jun 03 '26
I'm surprised to see Norway at 34.5 percent. I've lived in Norway and traveled the country extensively. I definitely thought the number would be much higher. It's probably because of the bald mountains.
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u/dkeenaghan Jun 03 '26
In addition to a most of Norway being mountains, a sizeable chunk of it is also very far north where few trees would naturally grow.
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Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
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u/Spartacus_althor Jun 03 '26
I drove from Oslo,Norway to the middle of Sweden last year, and that route was just packed with trees. Lots of pine forests left to right. Beautiful places altogether. Not saying it's all to do with their respective governments but i do wish ours would at least pay attention to these failings.
It's gone on for far too long. Wouldn't be surprised if they started blaming the lack of trees on emigrants next to deflect their greed and stupidity.
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u/monsterChomper Jun 03 '26
Does anyone with some knowledge on the subject know if this is changing, what the plan is for the next 5-10 years?
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u/Much_Thanks3992 Jun 03 '26
The percentage barely moves decade on decade and the extreme storms we're getting now due to climate change is making it harder for young trees to take root.
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u/TheTealBandit Jun 03 '26
No, nothing will really change. There is far too much red tape, DAFM bar too many people from planting any trees
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u/Gamalam91 Jun 03 '26
There are active plans for afforestation, but these will be shitty sitka spruce dead zones with a two tree thick edge composed of native trees..... in many ways thats even worse.
The European nature restoration law is the only current real hope. But that will only focus on public land, at first anyway
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u/Gold-Vacation-169 Jun 03 '26
Well lets see.
- We allow bogs to be illegally cut still
- Gov wants more data centers
- Gov ignores reports on one off rural housing so they'll ensure by allowing it 100,000s of acres which could be rewilded or forested will instead be unsustainable housing.
- Gov continue to support mono-culture and upto April had a gov minister who actually did the forward for a pro plantation book on silka spruce supported by the wood industry which was sent to every school in the country.
- Gov continuous to have national parks which sheep are allowed to continue to graze so tree's don't stand a chance of establishing. Nevermind what is happening to our mountains due to sheep.So outlook looks grim.
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u/qwerty_1965 Jun 03 '26
"Why have trees when you can export beef!"
I think we should nominate one county and just blitz it with saplings and a "no hoofed animals" order
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u/dkeenaghan Jun 03 '26
Wicklow would be a good candidate. It already has a higher percentage of tree cover, and a lot of barren land that really should be forest.
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u/dkeenaghan Jun 03 '26
The county as a whole has far higher forest cover than any other county, at 20% it's far higher than the country average. It's just not in those places you mentioned, well, except for Glenmalure.
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u/Lofi_Btz Jun 03 '26
If anyone’s curious what the tiny percentage of real native Irish rainforest still looks like, this video is unreal.
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Jun 03 '26
To put a positive spin on this, when I was a kid it was ~ 3%. The question is; Is that 11% native forest or simply Coiltr crop forests?
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u/LewBae Jun 03 '26
There's a great YouTube documentary on the history of Ireland's rainforests. It's called Ireland's Invisible Rainforest
A stunning watch.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26
And yet I still get mass downvoted every time I try to explain that the country being more forested and the country being less incredibly underpopulated are not in fact mutually exclusive.
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u/IrishLedge Jun 04 '26
My memory of the Cooley Mountains when I was a kid vs now. Really sucks. The view from the navvy river was amazing
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Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
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u/effortDee Jun 03 '26
Iceland was once covered in Rowan and Birch but sheep were introduced.
This % also includes forestry which is a crop and monoculture, this is not the percentage of native woodland, this is total woodlands combined, so its actually far worse than what the data represents as forestry is basically a deadzone for biodiversity.
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u/Hungry-Western9191 Jun 03 '26
One reason why Finland does so well on this chart. They have massive areas of farmed trees.
Ok, it.doesnt make us better but if talking about forest cover in Europe, no-one has more than a fraction of a percent of old growth forest.
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u/hwyl1066 Jun 04 '26
No, they still have the natural feel, not like the Irish tree fields. They are mixed, uneven, with swamps, lakes, rocks, hills etc. They support of host of local traditional species, are perfectly hikeable. They are not true wilderness though but neither are they monocultural plantations.
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u/IWillYeahBoy Jun 03 '26
Do the stats include only forest I wonder, and what constitutes a forest? Does it need to be over a certain size, or a certain amount of trees? The U.N says it need to be more than an acre of trees.
Don't get me wrong, we need more native forests here and Coillte can take a running jump at themselves but I always wonder when I see this statistic being brought up. Our fields nearly always have a decent boundary of native trees, except for the west, are these included in the stats?
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u/Fridrick Jun 03 '26
By "covered", it wouldve only meant land below ≈300m elevation - meaning that at best only a third wouldve ever been forested. Regardless we still fucked up royally.
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u/northkerry Jun 04 '26
Really? From my tour around iceland most of it was volcanic landscapes with very little soil cover for huge swathes of the country.
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u/isogaymer Jun 03 '26
Absolutely it is. From the outside/on top much of the commercial plantations (in particular the Sitka spruce) across the country may look green but I would encourage everyone to talk a walk in them if they can. Under the canopy it is a dead zone, overwhelmingly brown and dead. The foliage cover is extremely dense and inhibits the formation of the lower tier habitats that make a naturally formed forest so vibrant. The ground is carpeted and I do mean carpeted, in withered needles. They can be eerily silent. It can even smell decayed.
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u/rookie-on-the-road Jun 03 '26
Ive camped in a commercial forest before and its awful. Once you get past the outer layer of trees its completely bare inside. The ground is practically a sponge of dead and withered needles. On top of that the rows that the trees are planted in raise up, so the ground is like a plowed field with mounds and furrows.
There is no food in there for wildlife. No berries, no foliage, no fruit, nothing, so it feels completely empty and dead.
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u/effortDee Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Two examples for you:
A single oak tree can host upwards of 2000 different life forms, birds, bees, lychens, butterflies have symbiotic relationships with them, etc, etc
Go in to a forestry of the same tree that is tightly packed together and listen, you'll hear almost nothing.
One of the best ways to "measure" biodiversity imo is to lie down and look up and then close your eyes and listen.
A monoculture woodland you see no diversity when you do this and you hear nothing.
My wife does sound ecology and we came up with that approach to help people really see and hear if biodiversity exists in a landscape.
Now im just imagining lying down in a wild meadow and seeing the flowers above me and the insects all stirring!
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u/marley67 Jun 03 '26
I'll put it this way, a naturally established woodland has evolved over thousands of years. The flora and fauna have evolved alongside this habitat. All niches within this habitat have been exploited, complicated food chains etc.
For example, Native oak trees in Ireland support more than 2300 species of animals, plants, fungi, and lichens. Of this, approx 300 to 400 species are entirely dependent on the oak tree for their survival.
Now compare this with a non-native plantation of Sitka spruce which is subjected to clear-fell harvesting every 35-55 years.
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u/hibernodeutsch Jun 03 '26
The commercial forests are biodiversity deadzones. Go to one and check it out if you have one nearby. The ground is bare apart from the sitka spruce pines and branches. The 'forest' is silent. No birds. No animals. It's eerie and depressing.
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u/isogaymer Jun 03 '26
We beat the Netherlands yes, but they are roughly under three quarters our size, with triple the population and yet are the largest agricultural exporters in the world. Even the things this government tells us we excel at are lies.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Our natural landscapes are also absolutely annihilated by loads of countries, but no one notices because those countries already have loads to offer on the modern/urban side of things, while we don't.
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u/cmVkZGl0MjAyNQ Jun 04 '26
I was also thinking that it feels a bit unfair to count all the polders as "unforested".
I guess they could have planted trees, but it's not like they chopped down forests to get to that point like Ireland did, they just made more empty land9
u/Gold-Vacation-169 Jun 03 '26
Malta and Iceland both had large forest cover but humans destroyed it.
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u/box_of_carrots Jun 03 '26
It wasn't the Brits who denuded our land of trees, it started way back in Neolithic times.
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u/Excellent_While808 Jun 03 '26
Most the trees were cut down for agriculture before the Brits took over too
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u/Cockur Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
No they weren’t. The bulk of Irish deforestation happened 16th to 19th century. The absolute zenith of bristish occupation. Yes for agriculture mainly. But for plantation land owned and run by British landlords. Then on top of this to supply their navy too.
Get out of here blaming the largely subservient native population for using some of their own wood. The supplying of the British navy with was was an undertaking that had to be repeated year after year after year. Unlike agriculture where the land was cleared once. Ships had to be rebuilt and maintained constantly. Which meant wood had to be in constant supply.
This didn’t end until the Industrial Revolution and the age of steel
Edit: I should add that we never built our own navy or occupied any other countries so there isn’t even a single chance that we have deforest on anything like the scale the British have
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u/effortDee Jun 03 '26
Going vegan means we save upwards of 76% of our landmass and we can rewild the vast majority of that.
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u/SmallWolf117 Jun 03 '26
Not that this is an argument against that
But I also doubt we would lol.
We need to plan for a future where nothing over 6 stories is ever built in Dublin and so we just build longer and longer bus routes to further and further suburbs until we are all dubs. It's the way forward
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u/Iricliphan Jun 03 '26
I totally get that and I've reduced my meat intake. There's no way I'd ever give up meat though b
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u/DarthWarder Jun 03 '26
Yeah, let's get rid of the only type of nutrition source that the country can actually produce and is higher quality & cheaper than the rest of Europe; since farming on scale is near impossible here, let's just import absolutely everything.
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u/effortDee Jun 03 '26
Ireland animal agriculture industry and all others around the world are reliant on imports to feed their animals.
Ireland can grow many many different types of crops and plants, the only reason you see animal-farming everywhere is because it is so heavily subsidised.
Why is it subsidised? Because its inefficient, unprofitable and destroys environments.
Never heard of a poly tunnel? vertical farming? food forests? normal crop farms? orchards?
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u/dominic2k Jun 04 '26
But it also means people will be smug vegans who think they're better than everyone else because they don't eat meat, that's a much worse scenario.
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u/PremiumTempus Jun 03 '26
People blame the brits on everything. Why don’t we have public transport? The brits. Who was responsible for building our entire rail network? The Brits. Who was responsible for tearing down our tram lines? The Irish. Who was responsible for not building any kilometres of new rail? The Irish
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u/Garlic-Cheese-Chips Jun 03 '26
an artifical underwater yoke
The Dutch will be bullin' if they ever read this.
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u/Hangdog90 Jun 04 '26
Thank the Brits again. They took over 80% of our oak forests to build their wooden ships starting from the 16th century. They destroyed other woodlands as part of military tactics. When tney got here, we had a natural rain forest covering most of the country.
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u/UrbanStray Jun 04 '26
Up to 40% of Iceland was once covered by forests. It's not too cold for trees.
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u/Material_Rush3143 Jun 03 '26
You can't clear it if it's planted, unless you want to repay the planting grant and all annual premiums received or find an alternative site and replant an identical sized area. We won't even talk about the cost of clearing the stumps. And that follows the land title so "selling" to a family member won't change that picture.
It was promoted heavily 30/40 years ago by Govt as a pension pot (sitka). 30 years later storms have decimated many plantations just as they mature. There are lots of reasons that people who want to plant cannot plant. You need a licence for a start - depending on the depth of peat, if any, you may/may not get a licence. Ireland has a lot of peatland so this is a big issue. Hen harriers and other nesting birds in the area - no licence. Setbacks from the road, water and ESB lines make a lot of small parcels of land unviable. Archaeological reasons are often why a licence is not granted, or granted on a reduced area again making a small parcel unviable for planting.
Generally an application costs €500+VAT, if the DAFM come back and say they want an archeology report and ecology report, your costs are closer to 2k with no guarantee of getting a licence. The big bad landowners are not always to blame. Just my thoughts. For clarity - I'm not a farmer or from a farming background.
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u/Slice_apizza Jun 03 '26
The British Navy sourced timber from the Scandinavia and Canada, and later the Tropics (for Teak), and not Ireland, which didn’t have many Oak or tall Fir trees, so you can all stop blaming the British! 😂
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u/Careful_Contract_806 Jun 03 '26
Sorry this has made me laugh because my half Dutch friend in school used to always complain about Ireland having no forests and how the Netherlands were sooooo much better and Ireland was a disgrace. It used to annoy me so much, but now here's proof Ireland is better 🤣
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u/tenpostman Jun 03 '26
wait, 11.5% is that even true? Or does it just mean "trees per square km" or something? Could've sword I saw a stat last year saying Ireland had <2% woodlands
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u/ScepticalReciptical Jun 03 '26
Native forest is the 2% figure. 11% included commercially managed growth.
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u/Common-Spend5000 Jun 03 '26
Ireland used to have the lowest excluding Iceland and Malta, and was only 9% in the 00s. So at least some modest improvement.
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u/Acrobatic_Loss467 Jun 03 '26
I thought we were supposed to be good at that stuff.
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u/ScepticalReciptical Jun 03 '26
Irish people look at tilled fields and think it's the natural ecological state of the country.
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u/Dull_Brain2688 Jun 03 '26
We’ve had a century to rectify this and all we’ve done is plant non-native spruce all over the place. All it would take is a law dictating that 20% of new woodland must be native and not harvested for 50 years minimum. But no, can’t step on the toes of investors and pension funds.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
We haven't really had a century, since the country was poor and devoid of resources for a very long time.
But we do have no excuse for how little we've done to reforest the countrry in the last ~30 years or so, just as there's no excuse for how little were done to improve public transport.
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u/HanesPrydain Jun 03 '26
Something like 90% of Wales is farmland
Same with the Scottish highlands , we used to be a temperate rainforest and now mostly sheep farming with almost all trees chopped down .
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 03 '26
Beyond depressing. We get all the downsides of being rural and empty, but none of the benefits, and the same goes for being an island.
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u/Local_Ticket_4942 Jun 03 '26
and the majority of that measly “forest” cover is sitka spruce plantations. 1% or less is native
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u/TooNGooN89 Jun 03 '26
Uk, agreed. We had such intensive farming, and now all our towns are tarmac 😢
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u/Pitiful-Transition39 Jun 03 '26
It certainly seems a very Irish and British cultural phenomenon. They have roughly the same figure as us. I'm guessing the historical legacy of rural landowner tendencies and the widespread usage of plots of land reserved for some form of agriculture play a big part. Our country is beautiful in it's greenery and the rolling fields are nice from afar but the lack of native forest coverage is a huge shame.
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u/AnySection3186 Jun 03 '26
I wonder what country we sold all our forests to. And the amount of woodland they continue to chop away is insane
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u/AnySection3186 Jun 03 '26
To be fair if it's not them it will be someone else the amount of wood recycling that could be done is mental when u think about it but it's mostly put into wood chips for energy generating but if we used half that into flat pack would could do alot the help the forests I'm far from a nature buff but I do enjoy a walk on the wild side from time to time and the view that greenery provides with the mix of natural trees is beautiful to say the least it part of or 32 shades and that will be history also at that rate. Also can you get access to older ones
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u/No_Word_6904 Jun 03 '26
I remember being on a business trip in the Netherlands when our hosts took us to see their "forest." It was basically just a row of planted trees, more of an avenue or an orchard than an actual forest. They were incredibly proud of it, and we didn't have the heart to tell them otherwise, so we praised it politely. Later they visited the Czech Republic, and when they saw a real forest, their jaws practically hit the floor. I even felt a little embarrassed, like we were somehow showing off. There are so many great things about the Netherlands, but the landscape and the lack of greenery are something I just can't imagine living with. I'm so used to having forests, hills, and nature all around me that I'd really miss them.
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u/itookdhorsetofrance Jun 03 '26
and probably 90% that we have is shitty pine. I'm lucky to have a woods near me with native trees and the difference on the floor between the w tyres of forest is amazing
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u/flawboy1979 Jun 03 '26
I would love to have seen Ireland before humans got here. A primordial rain forest Eden. There are a few places I walk where there are really beautiful old, tall native trees, not the stika spruce forestry trees. It gives a glimpse of how the country should look, or did look. We had the Brehon laws and a hierarchy for trees before Christianity came. It sickens me that we are so grotesquely oblivious and apathetical to the nature in Ireland and any radical solutions that may save it or help it to thrive.
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u/imoinda Jun 03 '26
But where are the 11%? I don’t see that much treecover anywhere in Ireland when I look around.
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u/EulerIdentity Jun 04 '26
Wasn’t Ireland covered by forests (like Finland today) in prehistoric times?
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u/Hastinggs Jun 04 '26
I don’t understand why we’re so heavily in surplus, giving grants for EV’s etc. but can’t address this issue or similar ones.
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u/MeowMeowCollyer Jun 04 '26
How about that British Navy, though?
Joking, feck those monsters for stripping the forests.
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u/Jumpy_Emu1111 Jun 04 '26
I love how if you're any way critical of destructive farming practices you get an earful of 'People need food!!' Well yes but we also need a habitable planet?
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u/aouid Jun 04 '26
Even more depressing is that most of that is made up of large monoculture plantations
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u/the_sneaky_one123 Jun 04 '26
It's one of the main things I notice when visiting almost any other country. There are more trees.
Other things: Less traffic, less street noise, more pedestrian streets, fewer derelict buildings.
What a shame.
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u/ImportantPension5818 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Tis indeed.
And the worst thing is that 11% is a very slippy number. Ireland only has a native forest cover of 2%. Native forest bring Atlantic temperature rainforest on the west coast, old growth inland forest (which we have very little) and native conifers (Scots pine).
The other 9% is coniferous forestry plantations. To be honest, it would be like planting a field of barely and calling it a natural habitat. While yes, some animals can live in it, there's fuck all plant life inside it. No understory, no brush, just nothing. Mostly dead pine needles. You'll find wildlife on the verges, but the only thing living in coniferous plantations are deer sheltering during the day amd flocks of starlings roasting at night. In some areas red squirrels take up residence in them due to the abundance of pine cones. But it's similar to birds living in gardens because it's the only suitable habitat around. Coniferous forestry is a crop that is grown for harvest. Sin é.
Why are non native trees bad? Well they aren't really bad like. It's better than no trees. But at the same time they are planted in such a way that no light reaches the ground. No light = no plants. No plants, feck all animals. I have seen coniferous plantations let go wild and thinned out by the weather and if the light gets on they become a good stable habitat for life. And then the deciduous seeds get it and it becomes a mixed forest. But the big issue is, a bird like a Jay, is adapted completely to live near oak trees. Of you have no oak trees, you'll have very few jays. Hundreds of lichens, fungi and insects are adapted to live with native trees like oak, birch and ash. So when these trees are replaced with species not native to an area, some of the wildlife just doesn't really know what to do. This is why planting native trees is so important.
Irelands hedgerows (all 689,000km of them) are home to far more life than those coniferous plantations.
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u/ColinCookie Jun 04 '26
The other 9% isn't conifer plantations. At most it's probably about 5%.
Nobody is planting Sitka and calling it a native woodland but you're right it's a commercial resource.
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u/rococor Jun 04 '26
Reforestation.ie 100milliontreesproject.ie gaelicwoodlandproject.com wolfgangreforest.ie hometree.ie cloudforests.ie lots of ways to help out and move the needle, meet like minded peeps and make a meaningful difference, even plant a seed in a bucket on your doorstep. Main thing to remember is that you can make a meaningful difference!
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u/Martynet Jun 04 '26
Considering that whole Ireland used to be one giant forest... It could be better.
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u/tarmacadam85 Jun 04 '26
Coillte has shareholders and pays dividends. Not much of a financial incentive for developing andaintaining native woodland wilderness.
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u/Fair-Tangerine-9472 Jun 05 '26
It's not a huge country. If half the place was taken up with forests, where would we farm?
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u/Brilliant_Claim_612 Jun 07 '26
Amazing and the highest level of agriculturw and poor water quality, its almost as if agriculture and these poor forest cover/ water quality are linked!
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u/Samhain87 Jun 09 '26
There will be more acres covered in solar panels this year to power an electric national fleet than native woodland planted.... and ye all say nothing.
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u/Imperial_Tiramisu Jun 03 '26
Ireland is a monoculture wasteland.
Fucking grass everywhere, but no trees.
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u/Cultural_Wish4933 Jun 03 '26
It is improving. Down in the Beara, the reduction in sheepfarming is very evident over the last 10-15 years. Mountain sides far more covered in scrub/shrub and hazel.
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u/Left-Astronaut6273 Jun 03 '26
Yip and that figure isn’t real actually forest. Proper forest is probably 2%.
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u/Wild_Respond7712 Jun 03 '26
Where's all this Spanish forest? If you mean wilderness with a few scrubby trees OK but otherwise these numbers are a bit suspect unless forest is very strangely defined.
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u/mcgrotts Jun 03 '26
I've been thinking Ireland should start growing more Hazelnut Trees. Also they are native to Ireland and cover nutrients like fat that potatoes lack.
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u/LadderFast8826 Jun 03 '26
120 years ago ireland and iceland had the same forestry cover.
This is a success story.
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u/Dyno_boy7441 Jun 03 '26
Isn't that due to the brits?
Though we can't blame them for doing nothing about it the last hundred years.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26
We sort of can in a roundabout way, but not when it comes to the last 30 years or so.
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u/Sufficient_Shift_370 Jun 03 '26
There is a bit of a population density factor. Not the main reason, however Ireland is more towards the upper density for EU, with likes of Nordics on the lower density therefore more areas for Trees and untouched landscape. UK and Netherlands have high density aligning somewhat with lower forestry area
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Jun 03 '26
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u/UrbanStray Jun 04 '26
Artificial surfaces only account for 2.5% of the countries land coverage. We're a sparsely populated country with no shortage of room for forests.
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u/TheRealGDay Jun 03 '26
Today the people chopping trees down to concrete over gardens and cutting down trees along country roads mostly aren't British.
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u/Gold-Vacation-169 Jun 03 '26
we've had 100 years to correct it, but instead we've doubled down and made things worse.
For example, we've had 50 years of gov reports on one off rural housing and throughout the gov have ignored the reports that say its not sustainable so we continue to build one off housing. Wasting 100,000's of acres of land which could be rewilded or forrest.
Thats only housing!
We can't blame the english at this stage.
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u/GoodNegotiation Jun 03 '26
We had reduced forest cover from say 75% to 15% long before they arrived. They drove it down to 1%, but we've had over 100 years and only brought it back to 11% and continue to resist doing more.
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u/marley67 Jun 03 '26
We still are at about 2% natural and semi natural woodland, the rest is just Sikka spruce plantations which offers very little to Ireland's native wildlife.
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u/YoIronFistBro Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
People aren't "negative" enough actually.
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u/marley67 Jun 03 '26
It's actually worse, Irelands natural deciduous woodland cover is less than 2%. The rest is just commercial Sikka spruce plantations.