Burning..

To kill off dead vegetation and promote new growth

Weather is v suitable at the moment for this

Why?

Controlled burning is allowed up to March 1st. It is an old practice of re-establishing fresh growth on hills, especially for sheep.

Saw footage on RTE news.

Clearly out of control when it was about to burn the fence posts without intervention by fire service.

Uncontrolled is the issue. Burning would fertilise the ground with the ash. The burning has a role and isn't damaging to the hill itself.

what's happening in Kerry is a disgrace. Had to travel from Listowel to Tralee tonight and there are active fires visible all over the place, flames, not smouldering grass. The fire service must be running on empty now, no backup for road traffic accidents or house fires (see what happened Wexford Hospital tonight!! If that happened in Kerry there would be no Fire Service available, they're all up the hills!)

The responsibility for the fires clearly lies with whoever started them.

Im not a vegan but that’s absolutely rubbish.

Those fires do damage to wildlife and biodiversity.

Scrub is not devoid of life, It’s teeming with insects and birdlife.

You can’t just set whole mountains on fire, this is not natural to Ireland.

You would swear wildlife couldn’t survive before man.

There are people who get their kicks from arson and just set things on fire to see them burn. If land is not managed to reduce the fire risk all that happens is it provides fuel for situations like last summer in Howth.

Most of the mountains in Ireland look like moonscapes. We've grown up with them looking like that so most people think that that's just how they are meant to look. That's not their natural condition though. It's a result of overgrazing by goats, sheep and deer (none of which are native to Ireland by the way). The natural condition of those mountains would be to be covered in forest. Our wet and humid climate is ideal for tree growth. However they never get the chance because the saplings are eaten by grazing herbivores as soon as they emerge from the ground.

Someone mentioned in a post about how the fires are used to "kill off dead vegetation and promote new growth". For the record, dead vegetation takes care of itself. It'll turn into humus and that, in turn, nourishes the soil for the next generation of new growth. This process takes time though and so some people put their thumb on the scales.

As well as being a potential hazard to humans and structures those fires devastate wildlife, many of which are incinerated every year in these fires. Just because "that's the way it's always been done by people" doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. It benefits a very narrow group of people and animals at the expense of everyone and everything else.

These fires were not managed. They should identify the culprit and impose both a criminal conviction and a fine to recover the cost of firefighters etc.

so it's ok to slash and burn ireland for the sake of meat? we export most of our lamb and 90% of our beef and dairy, why would we need to import any if we produced a bit less for the sake of having a bit more natural land on the island? it's particularly annoying that farmers dump their sheep all over our national parks too, land that is supposed to belong to everyone, land that is destroyed by farmers so they can export meat to other countries.

The noisy crowd have arrived on this thread in earnest. Plenty of farm land for sale up and down the country which they are entitled to bid on and buy. They can then just leave it to nature as they so wish.

Why don't they do this instead of trying to tell other property owners what to do?

Candles in a sod of turf often started fires in hills around here, while the farmer was in the pub a couple of hours

Your lot would rather cover the country in data centres.

An awful lot of hills were overstocked in the past. Lots still bare the scars. It was purely for farming subsidies that stocking rates ever were as high as they were. Animals and land both suffered.

Love these threads 🙂. Although I'm originally from the country, I've lived more of my life in the big city. I've dagged and dipped sheep and worked on servers in datacentres; just not at the same time. Give me the loneliness of the Sperrins, the Antrim Hills or the Knockmealdowns any day over Blanch/Liffey Valley/Dundrum. But I'm only a tourist there, passing through, not having to earn my livelihood from it or provide for my family. I'm not a big fan of sheep and would have blamed them for the state of our mountains. Thanks to this thread, I now see that at least some of that was misplaced. I would like to see a bit more native planting on our uplands, be it birch or scots pine or whatever. Most of that landscape looks fierce bleak.