Minister Gormley is in the process of putting the finishing touches to banning Stag Hunting in Ireland, a 'vital' component for the current program for government. Of course, this ban will not stop stag hunting in Ireland, because deer will still be shot and killed both legally in terms of culling numbers, and illegally for those hunting trophies.
The ban in stag hunting will affect the only stag hunting club in the Republic, the Ward Union Hunt. The WUH maintains a 150 strong Red Deer herd in Co Meath. The hunt, of which there are several a year, takes place by segregating a healthy adult deer from the herd, transporting it to a set location, and then chasing it down using hounds with the intention of capturing it again. Is this cruel? Absolutely. And as we have seen, there have been incidents of stags having to be put down or entering into public or private lands and giving rise to potential injury or death.
However, isn't it astonishing that the minister is taking such an enthusiastic zeal in dealing with what is after all, an anachronistic event involving a bunch of would-be-toffs that has absolutely no abiding consequence on the deer population in Ireland? Mr Gormley has spent well over a €1,000,000 of taxpayers money in an attempt to shut down this hunt, including losing €300,000 alone in one failed court case. Would this money not be better spent in doing something constructive about the deer population in Ireland?
Nobody is in a position to give a definitive answer on what the deer population in Ireland is. One hunter of national prominence has indicated that the deer population in Ireland may well be between 30 and 40 times its sustainable level. The difficulty in verifying this is because the minister, who is now three years in office, has failed to do the one basic action everyone has been asking for - a national deer census. He's perfectly happy to count frogs thanks to EU directives, but when it comes to compiling basic facts that you can draw conclusions from, he's happier spending money off on wild legal goose chases.
Let's be clear on this, even the most ardent deer lover is prepared to admit that the deer population is out of control over large portions of Ireland, a particularly bad spot being the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains. The NPWS organises hunting (culls) sanctioned and increased by the minister since he has been in office to try and control the population, but with no census, we have no way of establishing if this is having the desired effect. Even worse, the illegal hunting of deer is on a scale equivalent and even surpassing the legal activity. It's quite lucrative in that hunters both in Ireland and abroad will pay substantial sums of money to be given the opportunity to hunt deer. Of course, the problem with this is that they are mostly interested in hunting stags because they are trophy hunting, and this has little lasting effect on controlling deer numbers.
In the meantime, our rampaging deer population (one assumes as we have no census) are doing millions of Euros worth of damage to crops and indigenous flora, which has a knock on effect on native fauna. You may wonder why there is little native hardwood forestry in Ireland? Well the reason is that the little blighters will chew and strip every sapling they can get their teeth and tongues into by preference to anything else, and ring-fencing the trees is too commercially expensive in spite of the grants made available. So the deer quite happily reside in their Sitka Spruce mono-cultural night residences only to forage down from the mountains where and when they want.
This is the sheer hypocrisy of John Gormley, he wastes hundreds of thousands of Euros tackling the irrelevancy of the WUH to appease the anti-hunting element in the Green Party, thus making it a Green central plank on the PfG, but completely fails to deal with the bigger, more overriding issue of deer control. A competent minister would start the ball rolling with a deer census, then get all the stakeholders together and drum up a steering group, with the express aim of coordinating the conservation, maintenance and control of the national deer herd for betterment of one and all. The minister's hypocrisy is helpful to no-one, save his own ego and stupidity.
In the meantime, I note Mr. Gormley in his best quisling role taking on a photo shoot of the first Red Kites born in this country for over 200 years. The minister has been in charge for three years, and yet he has done nothing to protect the attempts to reintroduce Red Kites, Golden and Sea Eagles in this country from rampant poisoning. Indeed, this is the worst year on record, happening directly on his watch. No new legislation, no random searches of farms, no random searches of suspect areas identified from tracking tags, no arrests, no prosecutions. NO. NOTHING.
This is a minister of self-serving drivel, a man of inaction, worse, a man whose few actions are counter-productive and inconsequential, because his limitations in ability and aptitude blinker him from realising simple, basic, tasks and legislation. He is a failure in common sense, a failure as a representative of the Green Party, and the sooner the country is rid of this hypocritical quisling, the better.
