In the context of a biodiversity emergency, the unqualified call by the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and County and City Management Association (CCMA) to landowners to cut their hedgerows before March 1 is reckless.
Instead, these organisations should have urged landowners to cut those hedgerows (and only those hedgerows) that are a danger to road safety.
Since the opening of the hedge-cutting season, over the last few months our beautiful system of native hedges has been battered, chopped, and generally butchered, sometimes in the name of road safety and sometimes for other unknown reasons.
Teagasc has excellent guidelines on the maintenance of hedgerows that preserve their biodiversity value, but I have rarely seen an Irish hedgerow cut in line with these guidelines.
It is crucial that hedgerows that may pose a risk to road safety are properly maintained, but this provides no excuse to pulverise long stretches of hedgerow that pose no safety risk.
As a bee farmer, I have experienced firsthand each year the ongoing diminishment of the biodiversity value of our hedgerows.
In my work, I constantly travel the rural highways and byways of Co. Louth, and I have very rarely seen a hedgerow that could be considered a threat to road safety.
On the other hand, I have seen plenty of bad and reckless driving behaviour that has put other road users at risk.
The wholesale butchery of our roadside hedgerows will have no impact on road safety but will add to the continued loss of rural Ireland’s biodiversity.
From Eoghan Mac Giolla Coda, Co. Louth .