Two weeks to St Patrick’s Day, and across Ireland farmers are frenziedly murdering trees and hedgerows before the lawful season arbori-butchery tragically comes to an end. The loathing of trees in Irish rural life has been a perverse norm for many decades. However, since the arrival of “global-warming” it is not merely perverse, but almost a form of national, legal and criminal insanity.
Yet where do we read anything about it? Almost nowhere. Politicians say nothing. The Green Party, the self-appointed guardians of our environment are as silent as a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis discussing punishment beatings. Indeed, the Greens seem more preoccupied with almost non-existent concepts such as “genderqueer” and “indeterminate genders” – both absurd terms being taken from their preposterous manifesto – than they are about simple green things that grow, oh you know, like hawthorn, beech, ash, weird stuff like that. Maybe because trees are resolutely binary and not genderqueer they’re no longer interesting to Greens. Or maybe it’s because they all live in Dalkey, the Devil’s Earth Station, and what they know about the countryside they’ve learnt from Enid Blyton. Apple-cheeked farmers’ wives. Rustic cottages. Crusty loaves. Lashings of ginger beer. Et cetera
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