Mandatory disclosure: Your correspondent knows Declan Ganley personally and has considered him a personal friend for many years. That said, the points he makes in this thread, posted to social media on Sunday, are well worth talking about:
There’s lots of Irish Ash in my part of Galway, this summer it’s become apparent it may be near totally wiped out, it’s hard to find an Ash tree, young or old, that hasn’t got it. We’ve red squirrels, hawks, buzzards, all sorts of bird life & more, reliant on that canopy.
— Declan Ganley (@declanganley) June 18, 2023
This is the story @Coilltenews, I have no idea if all or any part of it is accurate, fair or in correct context. Trying to work out how it got here now it’s destroying centuries old woodland and canopy: https://t.co/RBqrZy0tAK
— Declan Ganley (@declanganley) June 18, 2023
The scale of the Ash Dieback catastrophe in Ireland is not fully understood, I suspect, by the majority of Irish people. Teagasc estimate that the disease “is likely to cause the death of the majority of the (Irish) Ash Trees over the next two decades”. The word “majority” likely doesn’t even cut it – scientists estimate that only 1-2% of Ash Trees are naturally immune to the disease, which essentially causes the Trees to rot from the inside out.
In terms of how many Trees that is, consider that between 1997 and 2007, Ireland was planting about 1 million new Ash Trees every year, with Ash covering about 22,000 hectares of Irish land. Much of this was single-species planting, meaning that whole woodlands are likely to die off. Consider also the importance of Ash in Ireland – it is the wood of choice for hurleys, which are increasingly now being made of imported bamboo because Ash cannot be sourced in Ireland.
But where, asks Ganley, did the disease come from? And why is he, pointedly, asking questions of Coillte, the state forestry company?
Last year, environmentalist Tony Lowes, writing for the Friends of the Irish Environment, pinned the blame squarely on the state forestry company, Coillte: When the disease was first identified, he wrote, it appeared in a Coillte-managed plantation in County Leitrim. All of the Ash Trees in that plantation had been imported from the Netherlands, where Ash Dieback had been seen in the preceding decade. Lowes was in no doubt about where the blame should lie: His article was titled “Coillte killers”, and subtitled “how the State Forestry authority hastened the end of Ireland’s Ash Trees”.
When contacted by Gript for comment for this piece, a public relations firm working on behalf of Coillte denied Lowes’ claims in the strongest possible terms, calling the article linked above “potentially defamatory”. A spokeswoman for the state forestry company said that “Coillte was not responsible for the introduction or spread of Ash dieback disease in Ireland” and that Lowes article was “completely inaccurate“.
Officially, the state has not identified any point of origin for Ash Dieback in Ireland. The Department of Agriculture insists that the exact origin of the disease – on which €7m of your money has so far been spent to fight – is “unknown”.
Ganley, for his part, does not assign blame, but notes a coincidence: In the case of his own Ash Trees, he notes, the disease arrived very shortly after a Coillte plantation near him began to plant Ash saplings on the fringes of its Spruce plantation. There will be “a year’s work”, he says, just to remove all of the old Ash trees on his land which are now dead as a result of the disease.
Another landowner, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a personal connection to Coillte, speaks of a similar coincidence: His trees were healthy, he says, until the state forestry company, “about ten years ago”, decided to plant young Ash saplings in a managed forest about two kilometres from his land. “Every Ash in a five mile radius is now dying”, he says. “It’s an unusual pattern of coincidences. There does need to be a full investigation.”
Indeed, the scale of the ash removal that has been required nationwide as a result of Ash Dieback is mind-boggling: Since 2013, over 1,600 hectares of ash have been removed at a cost to the Exchequer of over €4.4 million – and that is only on land owned and managed by the state. Around the country, private landowners with Ash Trees in their hedgerows and fields are faced with the prospect of removing millions of tonnes of dead trees. These trees were, in many cases, important nesting sites for wild birds, including Buzzards who have always preferred Ash as a nesting site.
According to the experts, the problem is only going to keep getting worse. For tree lovers around the country, the situation is an ongoing – and heartbreaking – catastrophe.