An ecologist is warning that Ireland\u2019s legislation for dealing with fires that were deliberately started is 30 years out of date and the current deterrents are not sufficient.<\/p>\n
P\u00e1draic Fogarty told RT\u00c9 radio\u2019s Morning Ireland that \u201cin the very unlikely event\u201d that a person was caught and prosecuted, fines might be hundreds of euro, \u201cwhich really is not a deterrent\u201d. Fogarty also said there were mixed messages about \u201ccontrolled burning\u201d, which should not be acceptable at any time.<\/p>\n
\u201cFires should be unacceptable on land,\u201d said the ecologist, author and rewilding campaigner. \u201cWe should not be burning land full stop. This comes back to what I think is the fundamental problem with our unpreparedness … our land use is such that our ecosystems are completely degraded.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s meeting now a worsening climate<\/a> situation where we get more and more prolonged dry spells. So we\u2019re going to see more and more of these fires and worse fires unless we start addressing our land-use issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Fogarty said hills, where many of the wildfires were occurring, were peatland habitats and, as such, should be wet.<\/p>\n \u201cThey should be our climate champions because peat is so important for storing carbon. And they should also be really important biodiversity<\/a> areas, except they\u2019re extremely degraded state, which means they dry out very quickly and are very fire vulnerable. <\/p>\n \u201cSo, the response should be basically the opposite of that, basically trying to keep as much water on the hills as possible. We need to get our forests back into our hills.<\/p>\n \u201cOur native forests, which used to cover the hills, are not flammable. And we\u2019ve seen that even in national parks recently, where the flames just don\u2019t go into areas where we have intact natural forests. Unfortunately, we\u2019ve cleared out nearly all of our native forests from the hills, but we could reverse that.<\/p>\n \u201cWe also have a forestry model based on monocultures of one particular type of conifer tree, and that exacerbates the fire problem. This is a huge issue in France and Spain, where these vast monocultures are fuelling the flames. So we need to be transitioning to different types of commercial forestry.\u201d<\/p>\n