Hungry goats divide Killiney as firefighting grazers move in again

Irish Times

08-06-2025

Fresh from the drama of the
planning application near Bono's house
, leafy
Killiney's
WhatsApp chats are ablaze again with a new debate: are goats really the best way to manage the local environment?
Here's how it works: a herd of old
Irish
goats – formerly farmyard favourites but now surviving mostly as marauding gangs of escapees in the uplands – is brought to a patch of hill under supervision. They chomp away, and the vegetation-less area becomes a fire break.
This is of immediate concern in Killiney where a
2022 gorse fire at Mullins Hill threatened houses and left two firefighters with injuries
. But it's an increasingly popular tactic for councils and land managers. They have been deployed, or are about to be, at:
Howth
Head and
Dalkey
Quarry in Dublin; Ardmore in
Waterford
;
Achill Island
; the Burren in Co Clare; and at Coole Park in Co Sligo, eating shrubs whose ancestors were once admired by WB Yeats.
Sounds like a good plan, then? Sort of. The goats are not picky eaters. Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Council's 2024 biodiversity report notes that on nearby Dalkey Island, all is low grass and 'no woody plants have become established, probably due to constant grazing by goats'. That's not an ideal outcome for the environmentally conscious.
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Author and rewilded
Eoghan Daltun
says the idea is 'the height of ecological illiteracy'.
'The whole of Ireland was once covered in habitats like rainforests, bog, other types of forest – none of them would burn because they would all retain water and let it out slowly. The English ecologist Oliver Rackham once said that native woodlands burn like wet asbestos.'
[
Emerald Isle no more: Why is nature eroding so fast?
Opens in new window
]
With the woods gone, the scrub does present a fire risk for a period, but letting the woods regrow is a better solution than introducing goats every year forever, he says. The council says the beasts are 'less destructive than frequent use of machinery, with a lower carbon footprint and more sensitive to wildlife' – but those are both degrowth strategies.
'Concreting over the whole place would achieve the same thing,' says Daltun. 'And it wouldn't be much worse for biodiversity.'
Marcus Collier, assistant professor of botany at Trinity College Dublin, says the picture is more complicated. 'Much of the academic research points to 'grazing for biodiversity' initiatives as having positive outcomes in most cases as well as being novel 'nature-based solutions' for reducing fire intensity,' he said. 'Biodiversity loss is strongly linked to over-
and
under-grazing, so getting the balance right is tricky.'
For Independent Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillor Hugh Lewis, the 2024 pilot in Killiney achieved its objectives 'whilst also having popular support', and is now an 'essential element of the wildfire management plan for the area'.
'This practice has been used successfully in Howth for many years,' he told Overheard. 'Its more recent effectiveness in Killiney can and should be emulated by other councils dealing with wildfire management across the country.'
Zero back and sides it is for Ireland's hills then.
An empty balloon
Then US president Joe Biden with Corkman Micheál Martin in Carlingford in 2023
Fond memories abide in Mayo and Louth of the 2023 visit of former US president
Joe Biden
, who largely eschewed high-level diplomacy to focus on rattling around the homeplaces of his various ancestors making quips to smiling locals like any 80-year-old Irish American in the old country.
He even made
international news
when he alleged that his distant cousin, the All Blacks-conquering rugby fullback Rob Kearney,
'beat the hell out of the Black and Tans'
– again, fairly standard for an octogenarian Irish-American. He also referred to Micheál Martin as a 'proud son of Louth', among other inaccuracies.
The Irish press pack was kept at a fair distance from Earth's most nuclear-armed man at the time, so it's interesting to read in CNN anchor Jake Tapper's book Original Sin of the US perspective on how the trip went.
An energised Biden is described, giving his Ballina speech, visiting Knock and addressing the Houses of the Oireachtas. Then he encounters Michael D Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin where, true to form, duties went 'on and on'. 'When the high wore off … it was akin to witnessing all the air empty from a balloon,' Tapper writes.
Democratic Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley noted that Biden needed his bed – his speech was 'breathless, soft, weak'. He reminded the Congressman of his father who had recently died of Parkinson's, an observation with which another congressman, Brian Higgins, whose own father had died with Alzheimer's, agreed. 'When people see that stuff, it conjures up a view that there's something going on neurologically,' he said.
Biden, who often had more important things to do than visit Knock, would remain president for almost two more years and, for a period, was ramping up to run for another four.
A strange clutch of associates
Lee Harvey Oswald: a composite of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? Photograph: AP
For those who can't make it to the Bloomsday exhibition in Tehran
previously highlighted by
Overheard
, there's an option closer to home: James Joyce's Ulysses and the Assassination of JFK, a lecture by Prof Barry Keane of the University of Warsaw at Dublin's James Joyce Centre on the day itself.
A bolder effort even than Stephen Dedalus's algebraic proof that Shakespeare is the ghost of his own father, the spiel is as follows: 'Considered will be the figure of Lee 'Leopold' Oswald, who, like a composite of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, is out of sorts socially and professionally, nurses personal historical hurt and strong political views and is ill at ease in his domestic circumstances. What is more, Oswald boasts a strange clutch of associates and is given to flâneurial wanderings, turning up in the most unexpected of places.'
It will be, the James Joyce Centre says, 'a demonstration that truth can be stranger than fiction'.
Help wanted
Photograph:Who runs Ireland? Nobody at the moment, with many of the State's most high profile jobs unoccupied. Publicjobs.ie currently displays advertisements for chief executive officers
at Fáilte Ireland
(over the €6 billion tourist industry), Bus Éireann (over 100 million passenger journeys a year) and the National Concert Hall (over orchestras performing the Star Wars theme).
That's on top of the other recruitment processes ongoing or ultimately necessary given the news in recent months. A new
Garda commissioner is required
, as is
a head of the Arts Council
after Maureen Kennelly was blocked from a full second term by Minister Patrick O'Donovan. Bernard Gloster has
signalled his intention
to step down from the HSE in March.
The Housing Activation Office lacks a tsar,
which it may or may not need
according to the department's top civil servant, but is going to get anyway according to Jack Chambers. The FAI also
lacks a chief football officer
and a head of women's football after some premature departures. Children's Health Ireland is
missing at least four
board members.
Talented administrators who yearn to explain themselves to backbench TDs on drizzly Thursday mornings at Leinster House: take your pick.