Ireland’s Deer Problem Is Man-Made

 

With deer-season well underway, many Irish hunters are out and about harvesting food for their families, but as is evident in recent weeks, the numbers aren’t nearly high enough. Across Ireland local politicians and community activists have made their voices heard in relation to the problem of the overpopulation of deer.

It’s a pity that these politicians, and particularly national ones, didn’t seem to care about the creation of this problem during the Covid-19 lockdowns, where this story begins. One of the most bizarre rules enforced by the government, was that it was illegal to hunt during hunting season, the one time per year when deer numbers can be lowered.

Today we see the effects of prohibiting the annual opportunity to keep our deer population under control. Ireland has no natural predators, and thus it is up to the hunters of Ireland to manage our deer population. The benefits of management are not just to protect our national food supply and agricultural sector, nor just to prevent road fatalities caused by a cramped deer population venturing to new, more spacious areas; but it is to protect the deer population itself.

An overly dense population can lead to disease spreading among deer, it can cause malnutrition in the population, and cause them to wander onto roads and unsafe territory. This is the reason that we see deer culling in the Phoenix Park. While necessary to cull deer professionally in this enclosed, urban area, the thoughts of having to do so in the wild are sickening.

When calling for a national culling, what politicians are really saying is that they will be spending large sums of taxpayers’ money on a service that could have been provided for free. To hunt deer in Ireland, it is not enough to be a trained, certified, and fee-paying hunter, you must go through another process to hunt this specific animal, a process that has become a lot more difficult in recent years.

After paying for and completing a gun safety course, purchasing all of the required equipment and licences, and going through a rigorous vetting process, Irish people will be allowed to hunt, except for when it comes to hunting deer. To earn the privilege of hunting deer, a further, more intense course must be completed by seasoned, experienced hunters.

Deer hunting is a time intensive process, with some of the next generation of hunters finding it difficult to allocate the necessary time to complete the process to be allowed take part in this time-consuming endeavour. Then there is the land requirement, where written permission must be received for a minimum of one hundred acres of land to be hunted in a deer populated area. Unless you know people, you’re not hunting deer.

But this is a minor cause of today’s problem, though it could lead to long-term issues in terms of Ireland’s native deer population. The root of today’s problem is the imbecilic decisions taken by the government, all in the name of ‘public health’. During the Covid lockdowns, you could walk through the fields within your designated travelling radius; but if you carried a legally held firearm with you, you were breaking the law.

To date, nobody has justified why people were not allowed to carry their firearm with them when they went for their lockdown walks. People could drive outside of their restricted areas to go to a butcher for their week’s meat, but it was illegal for them to get their own meat within that restricted area.

As far as I have personally seen, not a single politician in Ireland had called out this lunacy at the time, and there seems to be little appetite to entice new and experienced hunters into deer hunting. Culling is not a sustainable solution, as it will add a significant financial burden to the taxpayer and do little to create a permanent solution do the control of deer population.

Rather than complaining about the overpopulation of deer, and suggesting that professional services be hired, a solution that has proven to create a long-term dependency on these services, politicians need to work with the NARGC, the IFA, and indeed consult with local clubs in the affected areas, to find a solution that will ensure a sustainable population of an animal that has no natural predators, and the potential the cause havoc in rural Ireland.