It came as some surprise to find General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British army – “Some say the devil is dead, the devil is dead…” – recently noting that the army was at its smallest for centuries and that he wanted British people to be ready to be called up in the event of war with Russia, the big, bad Bear in the East.
The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, poured cold water on Sir Patrick’s views fairly quickly. It is easy to see why: it is not just the British army that is finding it hard to recruit; the Royal Navy cannot find enough personnel to crew its ships while the Germans are mulling over a proposal to allow foreigners to serve in their armed forces in exchange for German citizenship.
(Très French Foreign Legion, non?)
The idea that anyone would fight, let alone die, for Sunak’s vision of the UK is preposterous; any more than they would for Macron’s France or Olaf wie-heißt-er-denn’s Germany. Indeed, from a purely Irish perspective, it is difficult not to paraphrase Ali: “No Russian ever called me a Fenian bastard.”
There was another little moment in the news regarding the British army and its training base in Kirkcudbright in Scotland which highlighted that odd intersection between the army’s actual role and contemporary priorities. The base is used primarily for training infantry and conducting live fire exercises to give troops some sense as to what combat may be like.
Believe it or not, however, the base is also an active conservation area and has been piloting a scheme which has seen the re-introduction of pine martens, native to Scotland, to hunt down the non-native grey squirrels. The hope is that this will boost the number of red, native, squirrels. The pine martens will do the dirty on the odd red squirrel but find better eating in the grey ones who have been encroaching on the reds’ territory. The army has also been removing “non-native plant species” and replacing them with traditional Scottish wildflowers.
It is testament to the way in which society has changed that the British army carrying out conservation work, in a place where it trains recruits to kill, is not really considered strange. The opposite in fact; it shows the touchy-feely side of army life. Yet, one suspects, had you directed soldiers to take care of red squirrels say 20 years ago, you would have been laughed at – not least, one suspects, by the soldiers themselves.
(Obviously, it is sad that squirrel diversity is such a contentious issue and those of a different coloured fur are hunted. Let us hope that squirrels will one day find peace across the branches and unite in the common name of Squirrel.)
It is odd too that the language of conservation, a worthy endeavour, is full of the sort of talk that would have you cancelled were you to direct it towards human beings. Conservationists talk freely about “invasive” flora and fauna and the need to remove them. No one wants Japanese Knotweed around, for example, though it might yet be renamed to remove any racial undercurrent. Do you hate it because it is “Japanese” or because of what it does to buildings?
There are efforts in many countries, Ireland included, to replace (boring!) coniferous trees with native (that word again) deciduous species which better highlight the change of seasons and provide birds and animals with a more traditional environment. As worthy as that is, I am not aware of anyone taking their coniferphobia to such lengths as to argue about banning them as Christmas trees. As in most things in life, balance is a good thing to aim for.
Further, what has been lost is brought back joyfully as rewilding: eagles in Donegal; red kites in England and even bitterns in Wales which have successfully nested and bred there for the past couple of years. The bittern is extinct in Ireland but was made famous in the poem, An Bonnán Buí, by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna (c1680-1756). There is something profoundly uplifting in learning that a bird or animal has managed to reclaim its natural and native habitat and that it is once again to be seen thriving where once it was lost.
That intimacy extends to people and places, certainly in Ireland. We speak of people having “roots” every bit as much as plants and sundering those roots can cause distress. One of the most famous poems by Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910-1988) is called Stoite (Uprooted), where, among other themes, the islander laments his fate and lives as a stranger in Dublin where they charge for “the leak” in your flat. (Has that changed?)
This is not, of course, to recruit Ó Direáin to any cause, simply to mention, in passing, the roots that anchor so many Irish people to their areas, be they rural or urban. Ó Direáin swapped one island for another; he never left his country, if you will, but felt estranged within it. Such are the, organic ties that bind.
(In Belfast, people used to talk about “our way”, that is, the area in which you were reared: “I know him. He lived around our way.”)
Still, has the worship of Gaia seeped into people’s mind to such a degree that it has provided them with a template for dealing with the issues raised by globalisation and mass movement, an applied ecology it you will?
The people indigenous to this archipelago (to use the language of the early peace process) seem to have learned the language of conservation well and, in their own reductive way, have applied it to their own situation: many, it would seem, now see themselves as two-legged red squirrels and worry about how all the grey squirrels might affect them and their habitat in the future.
That worry is simultaneously tempered by the fact that the red squirrel knows well the hunger his grey cousin might suffer and coloured by the intuition that the park ranger is just not that bothered about the reds’ fate.
Or is that all just nuts?