Failte 28nov2024

This program is sponsored by the Letter Frack Country Shop. It features a recording from the Connemara Sea Week Climate and Biodiversity Seminar. The seminar includes music from Billy Carey and Kevin Holmes, and presentations from environmental artist Zoe Ifuelan and Ray O'Foghlu from Home Tree Nature Restoration. The Atlantic Technological University is also mentioned, as well as the support from local businesses and organizations. Councillor Eileen Mannion officially opens the seminar. Zoe Ifuelan discusses her art practice, which includes collaboration with nature and using natural materials in her work. This program is kindly sponsored by Letter Frack Country Shop, 095-418-50. Hello, good evening, and you're very welcome to our Thursday evening program here on Connemara Community Radio. I do hope you can stay tuned with us for all of our programs this evening. We're with you right through up until 9 o'clock p.m. Next up here for this evening, we're bringing you a recording from the Connemara Sea Week Climate and Biodiversity Seminar, which took place in Letter Frack in October. And this is part one of two parts from the seminar that was recorded over Connemara Sea Week. In this program this evening, you will hear some wonderful music from Billy Carey and Kevin Holmes, who opened the seminar in October. It's introduced by Dermot O'Donovan and Stephen O'Callaghan. And on this evening's recording, you will also hear Councillor Eileen Mannion, who officially opened the seminar for Connemara Sea Week. And then we hear Zoe Ifuelan, the environmental artist, and Ray O'Foghlu, who is from Home Tree Nature Restoration, who gave the presentation. Just to let you know that that was Billy Carey and Kevin Holmes, and just a huge thank you on behalf of everyone at the Centre for the Air and also the Centre. Thank you very much. We're going to start some of the presentations now. So just to formally welcome you all, I have a couple of different identities. One of them is being involved in Connemara Sea Week, and I'm going to pass and leave that work to Stephen, who's with me this morning as well, Stephen O'Callaghan. And my other half is I work here in ATU, I'm one of the heads of departments for this campus and other areas. And so just to formally welcome you to the Atlantic Technological University, serving a very, very disadvantaged region nationally, and one that has many problems in terms of development and keeping young talent in these regions. So the Atlantic Technological University was established about three years ago as a merger institutions to really try to strengthen the capacity of this region and along the west and northwest to be a sort of an attraction, to keep attractive talent here, to attract research, to develop communities. So we're delighted to welcome you here this morning. This campus focuses on wood technology, furniture design. We also have a teacher education program here as well. So without further ado, I'm going to hand you over to Stephen O'Callaghan. Thanks folks. Thank you very much. And you're all welcome to Panamera C Week 2024. This is a big year for us because it's the 40th anniversary of the Panamera Community Environmental and Educational Centre. So in 1984, three teachers, Leo Halatine, Carol Toole and Angeline Caneda founded CEDC and we've been going ever since. So CEDC was responsible for C Week, for Bob Week and for H Potato Breed event over the years and we, the committee here including Dermot and myself have taken that mantle over the last few years. But as we all know, an organization like this cannot be done with just a small committee. It is an entire community response to what Leo and Claire and Angeline had set up all those years ago. So I would like to thank certainly our sponsors over the whole week. That's all the local businesses and you've been involved with each of those. But especially today, I would like to thank APU, Galway County Council and Interstate INET for their sponsorship of today's event. A special welcome to Dr Katie O'Dwyer of the APU Marine Freshwater Centre and all the master students of the International Marine Research Program. You're very, very welcome and we look forward to hearing your presentations a little later. So without further ado, I would like to invite Councillor Eileen Manion to officially open the session. Thank you very much Stephen. We're ecstatic, I guess it's a pleasure for us to have a class session at 9 o'clock in the morning, 9.30. Claire, thank the musicians for turning up so early and entertaining us. They're two local guys and you can see them interacting with each other there, what they were going to say and how they were going to say it. Certainly, I was up close, I could see it. It's a delight to be here at Galway County Council and as Stephen said, it's a really, really special year. Forty years for a small community. Leo hadn't seen twice Claire and her person. Forty years had the vision to set up this Sea Week, Bog Week, all of these in a small local community. I think it starts with a school first and then moves down. The whole community engaged with it. For 40 years on, to have Stephen and Claire, who I know every day of the week, great that they've taken it on. The programme is so vast and so varied. Earlier this week, there was an activation dinner for the older folks in Oxley. Beautiful parade, live sea, all the events for children and all the events today for people. Climate change, we see it so much recently, climate change. It's such a big issue now for us. I look forward to the council today, the seminar today. Once again, thanks to Stephen and to Dermot and I look forward to the other events today as well. Hope you all enjoy it and thanks for being here. Thanks for asking me to be here as well, Dermot. I'd like to thank Connemara Community Radio for their support over the years. While it is, the committee organises a lot of what goes on here, it is only a small part of what we do. I'd like to give a special thanks to the expertise and time and dedication of a few people. That is Ita Harriot for the photograph, for Caroline for her work on the website and for Emma, who is here today, for her social media work. Thank you for being so responsive with respect to that. Interface, I know that is one of the key sponsors of today. Interface, for those of you who don't know, is an artist studio residency programme in a form of seminary in the Indiana Valley. It facilitates artists exploring the interaction of science and art. To date, we have hosted over 80 artists from all around the world and we have over 140 members. Now, within the wider programming of what Interface does, much of it is based on the interaction between science and art. Much of it is made up of ecological concerns. Around the facilities, there are 37 acres of citrus fruits and that is now being changed into native woodsland projects. So, since 2019, Interface has invited a group of six artists to make work in response to the restoration project. Now, the artists do not produce a result at the end of every year, but are encouraged to develop their ideas over time. One of the products of that project was that in the end of 2023 and the start of 2024, there was an exhibition in the Galway Arts Centre, which was very well received. So, it has been very, pretty much amazing and very rewarding to see the investment and the payout of the investment of time and money into this programme, which has grown for so many years. And it's a wonder to witness and to see the flourishing of all the artists and the programme associated with this. So, without further ado, we'll introduce Zoe DiFueno, who's going to give our presentation. Thanks so much. It's lovely to be here and amazing to see so many people turning up on a Saturday morning. It's a lovely festival. Congratulations on the sporting years. That's an amazing achievement. And the events that I've attended earlier in the week were just fantastic. Yeah, I've just spent two weeks in interspace and I'll tell you a little bit about that in a moment. I'm just going to share my art practice with you very briefly and then show you a film that I've finished making this year and just talk about how my practice intersects with the environment and issues around climate change, etc. So, my work is multidisciplinary. I work across a really broad range of media and I also collaborate with a lot of different people, artists, poets, musicians and also non-arts communities. And I called my presentation Art in Collaboration with Nature because I also feel that I'm collaborating with place. All my work is site responsive and also the materials that I use. I feel that I'm working in collaboration with that and seeing how they behave and how they perform. So, this is one example of a walking project that I did. And I went on several different walks and collected materials and then I made paint and ink from that. I've taken them, planted them, etc. And also found metal, made colour as well. And on the right is a map. So, I really like mapping. And this is a map I made with the far-edge colour that plotted all the different walks. The nest in the middle represents home and all the walks started from home and went outwards. And that was part of a wider exhibition of works on paper and fabric all from this sound colour and little sculptures as well. This is an oak gall on top left and that was used to make black in the illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells. So, it's a historical black ink. Yeah, the oak gall is the black. So, I don't know if you know, an oak gall is created on an oak tree when certain types of wasps lay their eggs. And then the tree actually forms that sphere or there are different types. They can be knobbly shapes as well. It forms around the egg. And then when the wasp is ready to come out, they kind of burrow out. So, you can gather them when they've got holes in them. And they're kind of green at first but then they turn brown like the picture. And then you crush them and leave them in water or you can boil them. And it makes a kind of golden brown ink. And then you need to add iron water, the rusty objects in vinegar. And that turns it black. So, that's how you get the black oak gall ink. And that would have been, yeah, the black in the Book of Kells and stuff. And it's a permanent ink on vellum. So, I think on paper it would eventually deteriorate the paper. So, yeah, that's quite a nice one because it's got that kind of story behind it. And we did a site-specific piece in a bookshop during the book festival and we wore dresses made of paper. So, we had the printing press in Dingle where I live and we used the kind of old mis-date papers. And they dressed us and people were asked to respond to the question, what makes a book? So, reflecting on, I guess, paper, trees, where the ink comes from and then ideas and thoughts and words. So, these are more examples of how place influences the work and also how the materials collected from nature are transformed and then kind of re-encountered in performance and installation. People are invited to put their earth pigment onto my skin. Bottom left is a piece about the estuary of Miltown and Dingle. And at the end, we walk into the estuary in our clothes. And on the right is an installation in a greenhouse that was commissioned by Other Voices last year. I used the natural ink to project into the space using overhead projectors that I got from secondary school. So, that's another... I try not to buy things. I try to reuse things. So, I work a lot with schools as well. I do a lot of facilitation and I design and deliver... co-design and deliver and create environmental projects for children. It's a broad range of work, but at the essence of it all is really trying to encourage nature connection and keep people curious about our world and, I think, finding the kind of joy in that connection and the beauty in the everyday that's all around us. Ultimately, I hope to nurture empathy, which I think is essential, especially going forward into the uncertain future. I get really interested in things myself. So, just a few examples there of natural materials. I like to find patterns. These are just things I've been playing with lately. I think the lichen kind of looks a bit like lungs and playing with deflection and seaweed. And the middle one is dandelion cordage. Just a beautiful practice. It's very grounding. I think it kind of takes you across time, almost, when you're doing these slow processes and seeing where they go and where you transform them. So, I've just finished two amazing weeks in Interspace, which I'm really grateful for, and thanks to Alana and Emma and John and everybody for being amazing and looking after us so well. I started to get really interested in lichen recently. This is part of the Greenhouse installation. So, using my own inks and pigments, I've been drawing lichen. And so, I've been hanging out with lichen in Interspace, using my own earth pigments to draw them and trying to ID them, which is really difficult, using my hand lens, and I think I need to get a bit more scientific about it. Yeah, just kind of delving into these other beings. And I was painting it onto glass as well and photographing it on my face, just playing around, really, at the moment. And I think I'm interested in lichens because they're a symbiote, and they're made of a fungus and either an algae or a kind of bacteria. And I've just been thinking, like, what can we learn from them as symbiotes? Can we better acknowledge and explore our own lives in symbiosis with each other and other beings, which we are, whereas, you know, we rely on others. It's essential. And how might this help to shift our belief systems that are based on a kind of human superiority and separateness and dominance over nature? So, I've just been thinking about those things. And just briefly, I'd like to mention my work, my socially engaged practice, and particularly this project down in Terry. I live in Singles. This is Nyarksna Matari. It's a Creative Climate Action funded project. We have a whole other year, so it's quite a long project. And this is working with the Matari Conservation Association, who are an amazing conservation group that some of you, I'm sure, have heard about. And they've already done a lot of work to regenerate the dune system. So, Matari is a tombolo. You can see the maps here. We use a lot of mapping methods. And that's where offshore islands have been connected to the mainland by a sand stitch thousands of years ago that's very vulnerable to rising sea levels and storms, etc. So, I'm one of three embedded artists. We work with the NCA, a conservation group, 10 community partners, a project designer, and really our role is to bring in creative methodologies. It involves a lot of hanging out with each other, a lot of listening, quite subtle, I suppose, and doing a lot of place-based activities. We created a locally foraged and gathered feast in September, a kind of harvest festival feast. And we had little events around that where we made things. We foraged seaweed, and we made some food with seaweed. You can see on the left, that's an evening we had making cocktails with foraged blackberry syrup and painting the tablecloth. So, it's just little things like that that connect us to the place, to the people, and it brings up conversation. So, that is it there. That's our, the Creation Time Action office in Burma Town. Mine, just in case you're interested. And thanks so much to Tom Martini for introducing and I was sponsored by Alina Brunfelter to do the residency there this past week. Thank you. Thank you very much and thanks to Alina Brunfelter for the invitation to speak to us at the interface. Okay, I understand, Ray, that you're an old friend of the college and the Green Program, so you're very welcome. Ray O'Hoda, everybody. Thanks. There was so much thought-provoking stuff in that. I once heard the artist Dorothy Pratt say that being an artist is great because you can become an expert in anything you want again and again and again. That reminds me of this other thing, I don't know where I heard it, but the saying is, observation is the beginning of devotion. And I think what you saw in that film is an artist really observing their place and the intricacies of their place and their connection to their place. And I'm loving the way the world of art is moving towards the world of ecology because artists tend to, I suppose, exist as a kind of cultural avant-garde. And if they're talking about these things, I think we'll all be talking about them in another few years. So, yeah, that was super. So, you're definitely going to like this, Zoe, because there's loads of lichens. And we do have loads to learn from lichens about cooperation and reciprocity, but one thing I would say is that lichens are what are called obligate symbiotes. They can't live apart. They can only live as a symbiotic organisation. Unlike us and the planet Earth. The planet Earth will happily go on without us. We will not go on without it. My name is Ray O'Fallow. I've taken, I suppose, environmental science as my background, but I originally studied fine arts in ACU. It was GMIT at the time. Yeah, and still have good connections. Yeah, inside and all that. So, I work with Home Trade, the native woodland charity based in West Clare. So, I'll talk a little bit about our mission. Most of what I'm talking about in today's, through today's slides, are Ireland's oceanic woodlands. It's a fundamental part of our organisational strategy is these woodlands, but it's also tied in really nicely with Sea Week, because these woodlands and their relationship to the ocean, they can't be disentangled. So, just a bit about us. Yeah, we're a charity based in the west of Ireland. We're based in Simon in Clare. We have locations around the west of Ireland, and we'll have a couple of more locations. We do own a couple of hundred acres, but we don't have large land-owning ambitions. Our ambitions are really large, but they're about working with existing landowners, primarily. We own land because it can be really useful to demonstrate things, demonstrate the changes we want to see. But also, a lot of people are disconnected from land completely, and it's an opportunity to bring people out to pieces of land, be they woodland, peatlands, whatever like that. So, that's our headquarters there. It's a 60-acre supper farm. We are no longer working out of those T-shapes. Actually, it was upgraded. I don't think I have a picture of both there. Yeah, there was no staff three years ago, and now we have 20 staff. So, we're growing a lot. Yeah, I suppose it's Matt Smith, my colleague. He feels like Home Free is an organic response to some of the crises we face around biodiversity and around climate change. Just quickly about what we do. We bring land into restoration through ownership and partnership. We were very much a science-based or evidence-based organisation. We do loads of different things. We probably do too many things. We have a nursery. We plant new woodlands. We restore old woodlands. We fence off areas, and we manage habitats. At the cornerstone of our work, what we do is community, and I suppose most of us are from farming backgrounds, and so we probably have an inbuilt empathy, that farmers own 80% of Ireland, and these are the key stakeholders in a lot of the challenges that have to do with land. But also, there's a key, and I don't want to use this as a negative barrier, if we don't have them on board in this journey we're on, we're actually not going to achieve what we need to achieve. So, the farming community or the broader rural community is critically important to us, and probably half of our staff work in community programmes. I was interested to hear you say, Dermot, that one of the big crises in the West is losing talent, losing young people, and there's such huge opportunity in the West. Some of the natural resources that might have been considered natural resources 20 years ago, like peat bogs, there's so much opportunity here, and yet we still have, usually I have a load of maps, I love maps, and we're still suffering from rural depopulation in parts of the West of Ireland incredibly, even though the towns in the West of Ireland are growing. We advocate, advise and educate, so we're reasonably good at communicating. This is what we perceive our uplands to be the natural condition of our uplands. I just took a picture of Calamore Abbey coming past, and it's one of the rare places you see trees stretching up onto the hillside. Unfortunately, there's a lot of rhododendron going with those trees, but the uplands don't naturally look like this. They look like this because of historical clearance and modern agricultural practices which keep woodland suppressed. This is actually in the Highlands of Scotland. I was on a research trip last year, and I see that the train line runs across the hillside, and when they fenced the train line off to prevent deer accidents, voila, the trees came back. So there's a place for trees in our uplands, and not just any trees, but these types of woodlands that I'm going to talk about today, these are oceanic woodlands. They've become known in recent years as temperate rainforests. That's not a mediocre term, that's a technical description of a biome. I think I do have some maps of it. Ultimately, it's dictated by the climate. You need very high levels of rainfall, and for it not to get too hot, and not to get too cold. The average temperature is between 6°C and 12°C, and rainfall of over 1,600mm a year. Rainfall radically differs, even within Ireland, from, actually, Letherira, which isn't so far from here, it's a little bit east, it's off by Killary, has the highest rainfall, around about 3,350mm a year. It's part of Wexford, or Dublin might have 700mm. It's a completely different climate. Our forest must be gone. About 1.5% of the country, even less actually, probably closer to 1%, is native woodlands. It would have been close to 80-90%. We do have 12% woodland cover in total, but this is the model we pursued. It's probably familiar to some of you. It's a tree called Sitka Spruce. We grow it often in inappropriate locations, like on peat bogs. We grow it all the same, same species, same age, and then we fell it all at once. It's great at producing timber, but some would debate that. It produces lots of timber, but has all kinds of externalities. It needs to have externalities. There's definitely ways of managing it in better ways. The forests we do have that dominate our landscape aren't the forests that should be here. Just some stats about our woodland cover. 12% of Ireland is in woodland. Most of it is coniferous woodland. Just 1% native. Of our native forests, here are a couple of examples. Alder woodland, wet woodland, Oceanic woodland, Fitzeroke, or Scott Pine woodland. They're far from the burn. 3 out of 4 of these are in unfavourable status. Even the woodlands we do have, the tiny amount of native woodlands we do have are in pretty bad condition. And afforestation. Afforestation is about the new woodlands that we're trying to create. Our target as a country is to get to 18% by 2035. To do that, we need to create new woodlands. We need to protect our old woodlands, but we also really need to create new woodlands. Targets have produced this figure. That's what they estimate in hectares we need to plant every year between now and 2035 to hit our target. The actual target that the government has set is to plant 8,000 hectares a year. And what we're actually planting is 2,000 hectares a year. So you can see we're way off in terms of new woodland creation. And that probably comes back to the whole community thing. I think I had some slides in about it. Basically, the old system was the state would just buy land. The state would plant forests. That was the forest service that became Quailshire. They owned 7% of our land. It was simple enough as a process. You didn't need to ask anyone, you just did it. Now, for various different reasons, the new model is about incentivising existing landowners. It's about asking landowners, will you take state money and make permanent woodlands in some parts of your land. And for various different reasons that we probably don't have time for today, landowners just don't believe in it as a land use for themselves. They just don't. The temperate rainforests I'm talking about today are pretty relatively unique globally. That's where they exist. It probably makes sense to a lot of areas with similar climate thoughts. I think that's from a European map. From a British Isles point of view, you see where they exist. South West of Ireland, I feel a bit hard to tell whether it's there or not. But you're right in the zone here, and parts of Donegal are in the zone. That map actually is using climate models. It's saying, this is where the climate tells us these woodlands should be. This one is actually using, it's ground truth, it's using bryophytes. Bryophytes are like mosses, hornworts, liverworts, different things. That map is made up of where certain bryophytes only live in hyper-oceanic areas. So that's where the bryophytes are telling us, has the temperate rainforests, they're almost left out completely, bar a little bit up by Valley Barn. So we do have some, do have small amounts of them left. This is an amazing example. I don't know if any of you have ever been down there. It's Ulrich Woods down in the Barrow Peninsula. It's incredible. They think it's only 90 hectares, so tiny when you compare, when you consider Ireland's got 20 million acres, but it's 90 hectares. But they think it's been there since day one, like since the end of the last ice age, when very quickly 20,000 years ago Ireland was covered in ice, 10,000 years ago the ice had led the trees to come here from mainland Europe, 5,000 years ago agriculture and iron had come here and most of the trees were gone. We like blaming English, but we did it ourselves for the most part. But some tiny pockets remain and Ulrich is one of them. Well worth a visit, throwing an old stone circle for good measure. This is in Mayo, as I was saying, as a charity, we're interested in the woodlands, but we're also interested in associated habitats. These woodlands don't tend to exist rolling from mountain top to mountain top because they coexist with peatlands. Peatlands also depend on high rainfall. This is a rare example, this is Lyran's wood in Dencar and Kerry. You do actually see how it interacts with the peat. These are the sceners of peat. Healthy peat doesn't grow, trees don't grow on healthy peat. So you see there's a very hard border that's not enforced by humans, that's just where nature says, well the trees will live here, but they won't live here because the peat is healthy. Lyran is such a rare example of a woodland stretching out onto the horizon. We certainly don't have too many woods like that in Ireland. This is one up in Culca Glen. This is actually an example of a temperate rainforest in a limestone area, so it's a lot of ash unfortunately. The ash is here is decimated and hazel. It's an incredible landscape, similar to the Burn Oddy's underground rivers. You see that this is Culca Glen and a river runs down through a temperate rainforest and then just sinks underground and disappears, only to emerge somewhere else. This is a ledge where just enough soil built up that some trees and woodland species could grow. You see the first holly ivy around the ages where grazing animals couldn't get it. We have woodlands all over these hills, only that they're accessible to grazing animals. It's a natural thing for trees to be grazed, but they can't be grazed every day of every year. Eventually they will die out. This is Black Beemer, again in Kerry. My wife is from Kerry, so I spend a lot of time down there. You see some of these trees at this age. There's a great book by Eugene Castro called Transhumanist in the Irish Uplands, and he talks about bullying, this tradition of summer grazing. We used to graze the hills year round up to a couple of hundred years ago. It was actually really socially interesting. Young people and old people would take cattle, not sheep at the time, up into the hills in the summer with saws, and they'd make butter, and it was great practice. Then they'd bring the animals back down on the hills, and we'd get a break. The Blackface Yule came to the west of Ireland from the 1850s on, and the system changed. All of a sudden now you had these animals were so hardy, you could send them out and they'd graze all year round. A lot of these woodlands started to really suffer. This is an oak woodland, a bit of birch woodland over here, and it's just not regenerating. An acorn will fall, it'll germinate, and it'll just get froze. It'll get froze straight away, so there's no opportunity for the woodlands to get away. As the old trees are dying, nothing's replacing them, and that woodland will just disappear without protection. Again, it's maybe to speak to where the woodlands still exist on our landscape. This is the glens of Antrim. Anywhere that it was difficult to cultivate or farm, you'd still find the woodlands. I take a busman's holiday every weekend. We go looking for woodlands around there, and it's just incredible how many of them fall into that description. Here's one up near the St. Baroness, existing in a really deep gorge, and that is a place called Glen Dine. You see where our woodlands are. They're really hemmed in to the places that we just couldn't find another use for. This is an incredible one. This is Doolin, and you see the gorge. It's a drainage channel, a tiny drainage channel with set-side oak in it, and a genuine temperate rainforest ecosystem just clinging on, just about clinging on. So, why are these things so interesting? I've heard it said that these oceanic woodlands are useful or interesting, and why should we care about them? Obviously, there's a whole natural heritage element. These really are part of our landscape that many of us are very unfamiliar with. I walk in these woods all the time, and I never leave anyone in them. I think we're generally pretty disconnected from our woods, but there's also a really strong ecological argument, I think, for protecting and expanding these places. This might be contested by other ecologists or biologists, but I've heard them describe as having the richest terrestrial ecosystem or habitat. So, we've kind of, if you imagine, biodiversity mapped out per square metre or something like that. There's just more species in these places than any, say, a bog or a species of expression. And it's not in trees. You can imagine we've only got 26, 27 native species of trees. So, the biodiversity in these places is on the trees that live on the trees. So, this is Wilson's Filmy Fern. When you have a place that's wet many, many days of the year, and it's wet all the time, and it never gets too hot or too cold, it's just the perfect growing conditions for a really wide range of species. They could be grasses, they could be flowers, they could be ferns, they could be lichens. It's just a whole range of life, and it grows on every surface. This is a fern, but it falls into a graphic called an epiphyte, a plant or a species that grows on another plant, like your epidermis. It grows on the skin of other plants. It's a real hallmark of these places. How do you know you're in a temperate rainforest? You look up, and there's photocytes in life form everywhere you see. It's just green everywhere. I surely have some pictures of it. Ferns, that's a really good indicator of these places. It's called the polypoly fern. It's the many-fingered fern. That's a great indicator. If you're in a marginal area, you might see some of this, as in the climate is marginally suitable, you'll see some of this fern, and it'll be tucked into a real nook on a tree, and if you're in a fully expressed temperate rainforest, this fern will go out almost to the tips of every branch. So it's a good one to keep in mind. But lichens are another great indicator of these places. I'm not a lichen amethyst or anything close. This is a type of broad-leaf lichen. Lichens, as Zoe said, are a fascinating life form. They're, as I said, an abdicate symbiote. They're often a fungi and a cyanobacteria. A cyanobacteria is a photosynthesizing bacteria. So the fungus provides the substrate. It hangs on to something, and the bacteria lives on it. So the bacteria gives the fungi food that it makes from the sun, and the fungi lets the bacteria live there, and they form fascinating, elaborate shapes. This is Peltigera, and I don't know what the ones are actually. These are also great bioindicators. The presence or absence of these can tell you a lot about what's going on in the woodland, what's going on with climate, what's going on with air quality in the area. These are two. That's Pulmonaria. It's actually not indicative of a temperate climate, a really wet climate, but it is indicative of really clean air. So that species has contracted right up to the mountains of the west coast of Ireland now, only because it's the only place where the air is clean enough. Things like ammonia from slurry spreading will really quickly damage this. This is hazel in the barn. Some of our hazelwoods are some of our richest habitats. These kind of multi-stemmed... People think you only get this multi-stemmed look from coppicing, that when you cut the tree back it grows multi-stemmed. Actually, hazel grows naturally in a multi-stemmed form. We never think of hazel as a non-living tree. Each one of these lads might only live 60 or 80 years, but actually the stool on the ground that keeps shooting them up can live for thousands of years. We never think of hazelwoods as ancient woodland. There's hazelwoods in Scotland and I think some in Ireland. But again, stretched back 10, 11, 12 thousand years, those nuts were carried by ocean currents to parts of the west coast of Ireland, west coast of Scotland. And again, an up close of the life forms. This lichen, it won't surprise you, is called Scripta. Threat! This is the best photo I've had of a deer, so I'm ashamed of some big screen. We lost our apex predators over the years. Bears went many thousands of years. Wolves, we only lost wolves in the end of the 1700s. But without... And we don't have a strong hunting culture. We have hunters, but it's nowhere like it is in the UK or Europe. So without their numbers being suppressed, deer numbers are just growing exponentially. And I love deer. We've four species of deer in Ireland. We might have five, I heard the other night. We might have much active variety. But one native species. But nothing controls all of them and they're just expanding rapidly. And deer are a bit like sheep in that they have a strong kind of hierarchical grazing approach where they look for certain things first. And if they're not available, they go to the next thing. And young tree saplings find it incredibly hard to live with the level of deer grazing we've got going on in Ireland now. So we've got a deer really holding back the natural expansion of these woodlands. There was a tender put out actually a couple of weeks ago for 13 regional deer management units in the state. It's the first time there's been a kind of a comprehensive approach taken to deer management. So that'll be interesting and we'll see where we get. We do need that type of approach. And I stress I want to always see deer in the landscape. But they just need to be at the level that allows woodlands to get away. That's the second threat. It's not going to be unfamiliar to anyone living in this next of the woods. It's rhododendron panticum. This is glanmore and beira. And you see the extent of it. It's that kind of almost lime green colour plant. It's not native to Ireland but it does incredibly well on the kind of leached acidic soils of the west of Ireland. The high rainfall of the west of Ireland. And it spreads by seed which is unfortunate. We've got other invasive species like Japanese knotweed that just spread by vegetative root matter. This spreads by seed and produces millions of seeds. So we've got a massive problem with this. And I honestly believe it's maybe back to the start that the only way of dealing with this is devolving the responsibility but also sending the resources to local areas, local communities to tackle it. Only they know the landscape well enough. Only they care enough. I just don't see this problem being tackled in a centralised way. It's a huge problem. In terms of what it does to our woodlands, it's like holly in so far as it's shade tolerant. It can live under the canopy. And so it can grow big, vast thickets under an oak canopy. So that wipes out all those lichens, all those flora. I spoke about that in the 80s, wood so diverse. They get wiped out. But also the woodland's ability to regenerate itself dies because an acorn will thaw through the rhododendron. The sapling will germinate but it won't get enough light to dry off. And eventually that wood will disappear. So rhododendron is a key threat. Just to finish up with a couple of slides I suppose about our approach. We'll end up having a couple of hubs around the west of Ireland. We have one in the Mann Valley which hopefully we'll have online in another year or two. But ultimately our ambition, and we've already done a lot of work in this area, is to work with existing landowners, to work with farmers. And we're really aware that people like, this is Sean Cronin, he's a farmer in the Borland Valley between Cork and Kerry, Kilgarve and it's just over that hill. We're very aware that his view of his landscape, his hopes for the future of his landscape, his perception of that landscape might be very different to ours. The idea of returning land that they feel that their forefathers pulled out of the wildscape and to now return it to what they might perceive as it was, is really challenging. And we're aware of that and it's supposed to be like the lichen and finding where's the sweet spot of compromise and showing people like Sean where trees can actually help them. And that might be diversification of income, it might be managing their land in the face of climate change, as you mentioned, such a significant challenge. It might be regulatory compliance. There's a hundred reasons why landowners might want to create some woodlands on their land or allow the old woodlands on their land to expand. But I suppose it's our job, not just Home Tree's job, but the state's job to maybe show the utility. I think we have a real problem, I call it policy by PDF, where the government brings out their forestry programme, there's loads of money in forestry and they expect people to pour into it. It's a much bigger, deeper decision for a landowner to make than just money. That's crystal clear at this stage. That's the depopulation, I think the time period is 86 to 2016. So you see the lighter the colour of the area, that's where the rural depopulation is still going on. So that's not historical. And you're seeing that pretty much it aligns perfectly with the temperate rainforest. Those pictures are from South Kerry, from Connemara, from West Clare. These are real peripheral regions. These are regions that are also heavily designated. Environmental designations are things that really impact landowners' ability to farm as they see fit. But they also impact, I actually was on a fantastic adventure yesterday on Killary Harbour. We went west of Bundarrahipere towards Magool Beach on a boat. All the place names along that coastline, they're all oak-related or ash-related. And I was really interested to see if there was any remnant of pastoral woodland there. We did find some and it was really interesting and exciting. It's all within the Mooray FAC, which actually doesn't list oakwoods as one of its priorities for restoration. So restoring these places is going to be tricky with environmental designations. So I'll wrap up now. That's just a map of Clare. These are woodlands that the state doesn't know exist. The state knows that five or six native woodlands exist in Clare. And I started a project myself and a colleague of mine are doing. We found this many. Just quickly, I've talked about it. Farmers, it's not an easy decision. But unfortunately if that decision isn't made, this is what we're actually facing. Lots of land in the west of Ireland is falling out of agricultural use. It's going into a wild state, which you could say is good. But that's not always going to be an ecologically healthy wild state. That could be covered in rhododendron. So I think it's about transitioning to a wilder west of Ireland, but with intention. And with the population behind it. I won't dwell on these. We've just a couple of projects. Some are cultural projects about working with landowners and artists. And some are more tangible. So this is an EIP where we've trialled an approach to woodland creation with 12 farmers in West Clare. And it was a huge success. And I think the main thing we did in this project is give farmers time and clear objective information. And make decisions about woodland creation. And we created 100 acres of woodland on 12 farms. So that's maybe the finishing picture. It's in South Kerry. And it just shows on landscapes that trees don't grow on these landscapes. They don't belong on these landscapes. They do belong there and they will grow there if we give them the time and space they need. That's it. Okay, next question. So I was just looking at interventions. It's like a sphere population. Where do you see, like what interventions need to be made in your mind? The best example I know, I don't know if you've come across too, I think it's one by, I can't remember the development company, it's an example of kind of devolving responsibility down to local level and training up teams to tackle these problems. They know where the road has ended, they know the landscape, they have the skills, machinery skills, whatever it might take. So I really believe in that idea of devolving resources and responsibilities down to a local level and allowing local decision making. So that's one part of the solution. I have to say, I think tech is going to end up being another big part of it. This might sound dystopian, but I think we can tell where the road has ended using satellite imagery, using drones, using AI, and I think in the not too distant future we might be able to, we will be able to treat it with judicious applications of herbicides. That again might rub people up the wrong way, but I think we need to be pragmatic about how we're going to deal with this massive problem. So there's a lot of research on natural regenerative forests, actually in the last year, adding to the investment to let the forests regenerate without the added cost of anything much. So I think we need a double-stranded approach to woodlands in Ireland. One, we have to plant new woodlands, I think that's important. There's some areas where natural regeneration, you see it perfectly here, it's down to the existing natural trees and work its way in. It will eventually form a forest, no doubt, but it will take a long time. And that's fine, I think for our old growth, old native woodlands, natural regeneration absolutely is, or natural colonisation, which is the process outside the woodland edge, is the approach. But there's also space for replacing trees that have been wiped out through grazing, like aspen, so we can do some selective in-planting and we also need to plant new woodlands. You talked earlier about the tradition of the elders and the children bringing the cattle up to the mountains, in a seasonal way. Is this something you recommend? Is there a solution to this matter of rotating it, grazing it, or seasonal grazing for the forest? I think we have to be realistic about time constraints and realities. Almost all farmers in the West of Ireland now work off-farm. Systems that involve going up the hills for months on end, permanent shepherding of sheep or livestock, I don't think are attainable, at least in the current way society has constituted, where we all have work to go to. Again, there might be tech solutions there, there's GPS collars where you can direct livestock to certain parts of the mountain and keep them away from others. They're going to change things in the Western Uplands for sure. The collar is basically, you control it off your phone, you just draw a map around the piece that you want them to graze, and when they start walking towards it, they get a beep basically, they start walking towards it, if they walk back they get a different type of beep, and after three or four beeps they get a small electric fence, so they just move towards the area and then once they're in the area they just stay there until he runs them on again, so it's a pretty cool system. There's a National Park just behind us, National Park of Killarney. Do you think these National Parks should become a resource for local communities, give them the know-how, give them the resources to tackle these things, and become a bit of a holder? I think, I'll finish off on this, I think, I see the government, because it has lots of money at the moment, are buying lots of pieces of land, I'm very circumspect about whether they're the right owner of land at scale. Again, I think it should be with the right support and the right resources, the management of these should be devolved locally. Now that can go completely pear-shaped, that's some of the problems, why are there pot-bellied pigs in one of the National Parks, because the local head of the NBWS wanted them or whatever, but once they're managed according to better ecological principles, I really think it should be local management. And there is a consultation. There is. That's a good point. On how we should be using them, without opening the roads. Yeah. Great, thanks very much, Oscar. You've just been listening there to a recording from Connemara Sea Week in October 2024, and a recording from the Climate and Biodiversity Seminar, which took place in Latifrac. You heard in this evening's programme, Billy Carey and Kevin Holmes, the musicians, the opening officially done by Councillor Eileen Mannion, and the speakers on this evening's recording was Zoe Freon, the environmental artist, and Ray O'Foglue from HomeTree Nature Restoration. And do join us here at Connemara Community Radio at the same time next week for part two of the recording from that Climate and Biodiversity Seminar from Connemara Sea Week 2024. This programme was kindly sponsored by Latifrac Country Shop, 095 418 50. This programme was kindly sponsored by Latifrac Country Shop, 095 418 50. This programme was kindly sponsored by Latifrac Country Shop, 095 418 50.