Fire services are urging people to be “vigilant and cautious” as the hot spell has led to a number of gorse fires around the country.<\/p>\n
A large fire Co Kerry, which damaged around 15 hectares of land within Killarney National Park, has been extinguished after the alarm was raised at around 5.30pm yesterday.<\/p>\n
The areas most affected were at Five Mile Bridge on the N71 Killarney-Kenmare road and Moll’s Gap.<\/p>\n
Four fire units from three stations were involved in the operation, with two helicopters on standby.<\/p>\n
Kerry county councillor Martin Grady, who is also a fire officer, said that with more hot weather forecast over the coming days and a busy tourist season under way, people needed to be cautious when enjoying beauty spots and to dispose of their rubbish properly, including disposable barbeques.<\/p>\n
He said the cause of the fire was not known and it was brought under control “pretty quickly”.<\/p>\n
The chair of the Chief Fire Officers Association said fire services are anticipating more gorse fires.<\/p>\n
Speaking on RT\u00c9’s Morning Ireland, he said most gorse fires are started accidentally, through people leaving glass behind or not properly extinguishing disposable barbeques.<\/p>\n
He urged people using parks and other amenities to be “vigilant and be careful” and to be conscious of the impact on the environment where fire is concerned.<\/p>\n
The Minister of State for Nature, Heritage and Biodiversity said Killarney fire was caused by human activity.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Christopher O’Sullivan said that the National Parks and Wildlife Service has been battling fires for a number of days.<\/p>\n
He said that it includes incidents believed to have been started by the “reckless use” of disposable barbecues.<\/p>\n
“Lighting fires or using disposable barbecues in a national park or any wild area is not carelessness, it is gross irresponsibility – especially during a heatwave,” Mr O’Sullivan said.<\/p>\n
He said that lighting fires in national parks and wild places can lead to catastrophic damage to biodiversity, wildlife, livelihoods and public safety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fire services are urging people to be “vigilant and cautious” as the hot spell has led to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-550637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}