After the Irish fought for and won their independence from the British in 1921, they had a problem. Centuries of exploitation had left the island one of the least forested nations in Europe, with less than 2% tree cover.

So, they started planting a non-native American tree: fast-growing Sitka spruce capable of rebuilding their timber resources in record time. And it worked. Today, about 12% of the island is forested. But in the rural areas where iconic rolling hills have been replaced by rows and rows of conifers, farmers are not happy.

Outside/In host Nate Hegyi takes us to County Leitrim, an area of Ireland hit hard by the Troubles and the Great Famine, to meet the townspeople who are fighting what they say is a new wave of colonialism: Sitka spruce plantations.

Featuring: Justin Warnock, Brian Smyth, Donal Magner, Liam Byrne and Jodie Asselin

A grove of non-native Sitka spruce grow in a bog in County Leitrim, Ireland.
Credit: Nate Hegyi

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

Donal Magner wrote a book covering the history of Ireland’s forests and timber industry.

Sitka spruce plantations are controversial in other parts of Ireland as well, including Cork.

There are also efforts to rewild parts of Ireland with entirely native trees and to protect and restore carbon-sequestering bogs.

It can be really tough to figure out exactly what was growing in Ireland thousands of years ago – but these scientists used ancient pollen counts to figure it out.

Researchers at University College Dublin produced a detailed socio-economic impact report on Sitka spruce plantations and County Leitrim in 2019.

SUPPORT

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CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Nate Hegyi

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Baaahhh!

Nate Hegyi: [in tape] check one-two, one-two. Hey this is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi

Baaahhh!

Nate Hegyi: and right now I am surrounded by a bunch of sheep.

Drone Lemon MUX

Nate Hegyi: So a few months ago, I was standing on a hill in northwest Ireland. It was everything I expected the emerald isle to look like.

Soft green grass, a rainbow at one point… and of course… a farmer tending to his flock.

Justin Warnock: Sometimes it can be tedious, but it's lovely when the first lamb arrives, you know it's all worth it.

Nate Hegyi: This muddy, steep hill is Justin Warnock’s backyard.

He drives up here every morning on a quad bike, that’s what the Irish call a four-wheeler, and shovels out some pellets for the sheep.

*Pellet sound*

Justin Warnock: it's a nice day today. But we've been up here blowing snow and sleet and rain. Wind. We get a lot of that here. But It's just beautiful. You can see the Atlantic ocean… the Donegal mountains… So you’ve got a great view from here.

Nate Hegyi: This is a view that Irish farmers like Justin have been looking at for a very very long time.

There are Gaelic surnames and traditions that date back to the time of the Roman empire. People have been tending livestock here since before King Tut ruled ancient Egypt.

These iconic rolling hills? They’re not just for Instagram. They’re a part of Ireland’s soul.

Justin Warnock: Our DNA is here. There's no doubt about that. My family have been around here for over three, 400 years in the Kinlough area. So we've been, you know, so we're well bedded in.

Nate Hegyi: Well bedded in, I like that.

Justin Warnock: We’re not going nowhere.

Nate Hegyi: But the landscape of Ireland is changing. For years, the government has had an ambitious plan to turn nearly a fifth of the emerald isle into an emerald forest.

Right next to Justin’s property was another old family farm. But his neighbor sold it to the state.

And now, instead of those iconic rolling hills… there are rows and rows of tall, dark American trees.

Sitka Spruce.

Justin Warnock: “Shit-ka spruce we do call it. Shit-ka.”

Stone Mansion MUX

Nate Hegyi: To American ears, reforesting farmland might sound like a positive thing, a return to a pre-colonial landscape.

To the Irish, this effort has been controversial. Some see it as a symbol of economic independence.

Donal Magner: Sitka spruce. It's the best producer of wood that this country could have Got

Nate Hegyi: But others,See the trees as a sign of oppression. An outside land grab that’s ruining the soul of Ireland’s rural communities.

Justin Warnock: my people and my ancestors fought for a better Ireland, and it was never to be exploited the way that it's been exploited. Never.

That’s today on Outside/In

Stone Mansion MUX

Justin Warnock: I'm taking you up here now. It's a bit of a climb. You don't mind?

Nate Hegyi: No. Don't mind. That's all right.

Nate Hegyi: Sheep farmer Justin Warnock wanted to show me something on his property.

We were wearing thick waterproof jackets and wellies – which are tall rubber boots. It was a tough, muddy, climb.

Justin Warnock: It tests an old man. The bike makes you lazy.

Nate Hegyi: When we got to the top we were out of breath and sweating. But there it was…

Justin Warnock: There’s the circle right in front of us.

Nate Hegyi: oh there it is! There’s the circle

Nate Hegyi: A neolithic rock circle. Which dates back thousands of years.

Nate Hegyi: do you know at all what that circle was used for?

Justin Warnock: They reckon that they camped inside it. But I would like to be up here in November or December or January, but they probably just come up here for the summer months.

Now, Justin can’t trace his family back that far. But you can tell he connects to this landscape in a deep and personal way.

Justin Warnock: it's amazing the amount of history that's attached to just one small piece of land. But you can imagine the amount of history that, you know, spread out from here. Yeah. All across what we have lost. But thank God there's a few of us will hold on and we'll hold it. We'll hold it. Out. We'll hold out to the bitter end.

Nate Hegyi: Justin Warnock belongs to a group of Irish folks… who think there is a particular way that Ireland is supposed to look.

And that these new forests popping up aren’t a part of it.

Of course, what you think Ireland is supposed to look like, depends on how far you go back.

and when the folks who made this circle were up here… way back in the B.C.’s.,.. Ireland looked very different.

4 Point Path MUX

There would’ve been vast woodlands full of oak, ash and scotch pine.

There were wild boar, red deer, wolves and… even back then… domestic cattle… grazing underneath this canopy.

Jodie Asselin: The island was as much as 80% covered by forest.

Jodie Asselin an anthropology professor at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta Canada. She’s spent a lot of time studying rural Ireland.

Jodie Asselin: There is some evidence that deforestation just occurred by virtue of the island becoming settled by people. they needed firewood and they had to build implements, and they built canoes.

Nate Hegyi: And by about 1000 A.D. only 20% of the island still had woodland.

it stayed like that for about 5 or 600 years… until the British violently conquered Ireland in what’s known as the Tudor conquest.

Jodie Asselin: which is an attempt to impose, like English law, English language, English culture, Anglicanism as the state religion and basically destroy the old Gaelic system and clear the way really for land confiscation.

Song for Sarad MUX

What manifest destiny was to native americans… the Tudor conquest was to the Irish.

Big chunks of land were given to Englishmen, who acted as absent landlords… subdividing the fields and making Irish farmers pay rent to raise animals on smaller and smaller patches.

They also started chopping down what was left of the Irish forest – both to root out rebels who were hiding in the woods… and because the English were constantly at war and needed timber.

Jodie Asselin: So there was a massive export of Irish timber to Britain, and a huge domain of that was just ships, because this is kind of a time of, of kind of intensive maritime rivalry. And England had used most of its own wood.

Over the next couple hundred of years, the British whittled down the last of Ireland’s woodlands.

Jodie Asselin: By the 1700s, all but the least accessible forests had been cleared.

Song for Sarad MUX

Donal Magner: There were quite a lot of poets who wrote about the forests.

Nate Hegyi: This is Donal Magner. He’s an author, retired forester, in his 70s now. We’re walking along this beautiful lake about an hour south of Dublin called Glendalough.

Donal Magner: Glen. The loch is really Glen da da, meaning two glen of the two lakes.

Nate Hegyi: Donal speaks Gaelic and he’s extremely well-read. Not just on forestry studies and the like… but fiction, literature. Lately he’s been obsessed with Irish poetry lamenting the loss of the island’s last trees.

Donal Magner: probably the biggest one of all is, uh, what shall we do for timber? The last of the woods is down. In Irish [speaks Gaelic]

Nate Hegyi: By the 1900s… Ireland was one of Europe’s least forested countries. Less than 2 percent of the island still had trees on it.

And this worried the British crown. Because its empire still needed wood. So botanists travelled to all corners of the globe to find new species of trees. Ones that could grow really fast in a maritime climate and produce timber.

Donal Magner: One `of our great botanists called Augustin Henry decided, let's look at a similar latitude and another corner of another continent, i.e. America. And they looked at about 5 or 6 species.

Nate Hegyi: Species that I am very familiar with:. Douglas fir. Western hemlock. Lodgepole pine and Sitka spruce.

They took seeds all from these trees – and others from rainy countries like Norway and Japan – and planted them on a vast estate in Ireland called Avondale.

Donal Magner: And they watched them over the next ten, 20, 30, 40 years.

Nate Hegyi: As these seeds grew… so did the seeds of revolution in Ireland.

The southern part of that country shrugged off the British Crown and fought a bloody civil war for Independence.

And when the Irish won that hard-fought freedom… they still had the same problem the British did… they needed timber.

So they went back to Avondale.

Donal Magner: they could see in Avondale what was actually growing tallest, straightest and one after the other. And the guy said, yeah, we'll go for Sitka spruce.

Piano melody - Stone Mansion

Nate Hegyi: Sitka Spruce.

It’s the tallest species of spruce in the world. Think of it as a christmas tree on steroids.

Even in crappy soils, it can grow up to five feet per year.

So beginning in the 1920s... newly independent Irish foresters got to planting… re-building their national lumber source.

Donal wanted to show me some of these first trees, so we huffed and puffed up an old logging road in Glendalough.

There, near a raging brook, was a grove of Sitka spruce. They were planted less than a 100 years ago and they were massive.

Donal Magner: We've got a guy here called Aubrey. Fennel who measures trees all over the island. I don't know how many thousand he has got at this stage. But he finally said that. I think it's that one is the tallest tree in Ireland.

Nate Hegyi: That's the tallest tree in Ireland?

Donal Magner: Yeah.

This Sitka Spruce was almost two hundred feet tall. And younger than my grandpa.

Donal Magner: It’s a monster.

Nate Hegyi: Over the past century, those efforts have radically transformed Ireland’s ability to produce wood. The country’s trees are used to build homes, shipping pallets, panel boards, biofuel. The industry adds more than two billion euros to the economy every year.

But here’s the problem.

Ireland isn’t like the United States. There aren’t vast tracts of public land that the government could just start planting trees on. It’s mostly private.

Owned by farmers whose families fought and died to take back control of that land from the British.

Now some of these farms are very profitable. I mean, have you heard of Kerrygold Irish butter?

But in the more rugged, mountainous areas… farmers have struggled to get by.

So that’s where, for the past 50 years, the state has been planting a lot of its trees.

And it’s where Sitka spruce has got its less than flattering nickname.

“Shit-ka spruce we do call it. Shit-ka.”

That’s after the break.

Vibrant Canopy - OUT

Nate Hegyi: Hey this is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi

Brian Smyth: we'll see the border with Northern Ireland. And all the roads here were closed. They were bombed by the British.

Nate Hegyi: A few weeks ago, I was on a drive with Brian Smyth – zipping along narrow farm roads in his home county Leitrim.

Brian was raised here in the 70s and 80s… when Leitrim was rocked by the troubles – a long-simmering conflict that erupted over the status of Northern Ireland.

Brian Smyth: you were a were a terrorist or freedom fighter, depending on the view you took. And that was very, very recent here.

Nate: Yeah,

Brian Smyth: And very close by. Like that school was bombed here in 1973 and nobody died there, but…

Nate Hegyi: Leitrim was scarred by the Troubles and Brian says the small towns, villages and farming areas here never really recovered.

Brian Smyth: these communities are being left behind and now just gradually being closed in under this blanket of Sitka spruce, if you know what I mean. You can see it through the valleys.

Merienne MUX

Nate Hegyi: The government first started planting Sitka Spruce here in the late 1960’s. And it targeted Leitrim because the county was struggling. There were the troubles, sure, but also, it was tough to scratch out a living as a farmer here.

The growing season is short, the soils are pretty bad… so most folks raise sheep and cattle. But not a lot.. because the farms here are often very small so many people have second jobs.

Brian Smyth: So they're doing contracting. They're doing all sorts of other bits and pieces,

Nate Hegyi: All of this means that land here in Leitrim is among the cheapest in the country.

Now at first the state bought that land from farmers and planted trees. But later they paid landowners to do it themselves.

And that attracted outside investors, who started offering top dollar for farmland in county leitrim and planting Sitka Spruce.

Brian remembers being a teenager in the 1980s.

Brian Smyth: my father, at that stage was looking to expand the small farm that he owned and was competing with investor funds at that time that were buying the land to plant.

Nate Hegyi: He and others kept getting outbid. And this really riled up some locals.

Brian Smyth: there was machinery that had moved in on a site to plant it. and the machinery was burned. So somebody took action and burned the machinery. And then the troubles were not in their height but certainly ongoing so there was talk of subverted ness and terrorism in the campaign to stop the forestry but it was just locals that were very annoyed and didn't want the land planted.

Nate Hegyi: Burning up logging rigs didn’t stop the expansion of forest in County Leitrim. Nowadays nearly half of the farmland here is covered in conifers – mostly Sitka Spruce.

And when it’s time to log those trees, it’s the locals who have to put up with the mess.

Nate Hegyi: Can you just describe to me what this looks like?

Brian Smyth: Well, it looks like a scene from Armageddon. Really, with the stumps of the trees, with the um, with the damage done to the soil, like the soil is totally turned over. We may drive down. Yeah. They might not let us

MUX - Order of Entrance

Nate Hegyi: All this wood will rake in tens of thousands of euros. But the people chopping down these trees often aren’t the ones who own the land.

Brian Smyth: it's industrial and it's very fast. They operate six, seven days a week. Um, and I've seen them at night, you know, with the lights on and the machines, the forwarders and the harvesters working maybe 16 hours a day.

Nate Hegyi: But it’s not just the logging that Brian takes issue with. It’s also the trees themselves.

As we were driving around, he kept telling me how they felt claustrophobic.

Brian Smyth: You know, they grow to a significant height, and sometimes they're right in on top of your home or your farmyard or whatever, You can see here, you know, how much the trees, you know, really close in the landscape

Nate Hegyi: This was a little hard for me to wrap my head around. A lot of people I know love having trees on their property. It makes them feel like they’re more integrated with nature.

But here, these forests are seen by some as psychologically oppressive.

Nate Hegyi: [in tape] just going to put this bag into the backseat

Nate Hegyi: After talking with Brian, I went with Justin Warnock - that sheep farmer - to go inside one of these forests.

Justin Warnock: As you can see there’s no vegetation on the floor. The ground is just black.

Nate Hegyi: Now, I’ve been calling these forests but a lot of locals like Justin call them plantations.

And now I understood why.

A forest, in my mind, is something wild and diverse.

But this?

This felt more like a Christmas tree farm. There were rows and rows and rows of the same tree – Sitka spruce – all about the same, exact height.

Justin Warnock: Have you noticed one thing? The only noise we can hear was the water,. There are no birds.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, there are no birds.

Justin Warnock: No birds. They don’t live in these.

Nate Hegyi: Justin was probably being a little hyperbolic. I’m sure there are at least some birds landing in these trees from time to time… But it was very very quiet and Justin didn’t mince words.

Nate Hegyi: How does it feel physically to be in a forest like this? Like explain to me what it looks like.

Justin Warnock: A dead zone. You look. All you see is just this dark Foreboding cloud around you. You know, there is no there's no life. As I said, there is no bird. These are just a monoculture.

Nate Hegyi: As we’re walking back to Justin’s car he pointed out a bumper sticker. It said “Save Leitrim” and it had a Sitka spruce tree on it with a red circle and a slash.

He co-founded that group with a bunch of other locals - including Brian, a few years ago.

Justin Warnock: We're the most random bunch of people that you could. You will never find them all at a football match in the church, in the one building together, except at a meeting for Save Leitrim.

Nate Hegyi: They’ve been fighting to stop any new plantations from getting approved by the government here in Leitrim.

And they have all sorts of arguments against it. That they are destroying biodiversity, that logging is polluting the water… but the biggest one… is that these plantations are a community killer.

Insatiable Toad - MUX

Nate Hegyi: As we’re driving around - Justin keeps pointing out the ruined foundations of homes surrounded by Sitka spruce. For him, they each tell the story of a family who decided to sell their land and move away.

Justin Warnock: My father was the local postman.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, really?

Justin Warnock: So when we were kids, my mum would always throw one of us in with dad to get out, get us out of the house. So we knew every house, we knew every lane. And unfortunately, a lot of those lanes, there's nobody living on them anymore. Those were homes with two or three families living on them. But they’ve all gone, and it's all forestry that has replaced them.

Nate Hegyi: Some of these plantations are owned by retired farmers who moved away. Others by wealthier folk in Dublin. And then there’s the pension funds and corporations… who see this land as a sound investment.

Not only do they own it… but they also get a grant to plant the trees, then annual payouts worth thousands of euros from the state.

They also get cash when those trees are harvested.

But they aren’t living on that land. Sending their kids to the local schools or drinking a Guinness at the local pub.

It’s simply a page in their portfolio.

And this is what really gets under Justin’s skin.

Justin Warnock: Because if you don't have if you don't have people, you don't have communities, you don't have life. Do you know, like if we're to be a wilderness? Well, I'm sorry, my people and my ancestors fought for a better Ireland, and it was never to be exploited the way that it's been exploited. And especially our County Leitrim. Never.

Gran Hovedvei MUX

Nate Hegyi: Whether or not Ireland’s Gaelic population counts as “indigenous” can be a loaded conversation.

But like I’ve said, many of these folks can trace their families back hundreds of years, through rounds of colonization, oppression, and hardship.

And on Save Leitrim's website, they don’t shy away from the term.

It says the group is fighting the, quote, “continued exploitation and decimation of the indigenous people… and their environment… by the Goverment’s subsidised conifer programme.”

Brian Smyth told me that they can trace back this will to fight for the land… to a very dark chapter in their history.

The famine.

Brian Smyth: huge numbers of people died in the famine here. You know, they just died on the sides of the road

Nate Hegyi: The famine happened in the mid-1800s back when folks in Leitrim were still under British rule… renting this land from English landlords.

Brian Smyth: And some of them were very, very bad landlords. They treated the tenant farmers abysmally, And I suppose the famine was the limit of that,

Nate Hegyi: Most of the crops and livestock they raised were sent over to England. Meanwhile, they survived on potatoes. Until a blight destroyed that crop and plunged the country into mass starvation.

A million people died and millions more left the country.

And county leitrim was among those hardest hit.

Brian Smyth: and that's built into the memory of people, you know, that, you know, they were reduced to living on potatoes and, uh, because the land had been taken. So, uh, that created, I suppose, over the many generations, the view that we, the land is ours. We want that land. We want to keep that land. and that's built into people's DNA, you know, and, you know, land. Land… It's protected with life and limb.

Nate Hegyi: And they see these Sitka Spruce plantations as the latest attempt to take away their lands.

Brian Smyth: the corporations are just planting it in a different way, planting it in Sitka Spruce, but to just earn a few pounds and the local people are just being pushed off and out.

MUX OUT

Nate Hegyi: Of course, the wrinkle here is that not everybody is being forced out. There are willing sellers that are moving away.

They want to retire, their kids don’t want to take over the farm, or they just want to earn some money. So they sell - to the highest bidder.

Bottomline… there are bigger economic forces at play.

But Sitka spruce has become a symbol of that.

Which is a shame for tree nerds like Donal Magner - that retired forester I spoke with.

Donal Magner: those who kind of pioneered this are being told, okay, it's the wrong species, it's trees in the wrong place. But as a state venture, I thought it was noble in the sense that we created a resource, which was where none had existed.

Nate Hegyi: The Irish timber industry – which was created from scratch using these plantations – employs 12,000 people across the country. And yeah in retrospect, Donal says they overcooked the forest with wall-to-wall spruce.

But the problem isn’t just the way Ireland is planting trees. It’s who is doing the planting. Donal says that needs to evolve.

Donal Magner: I've been doing this for years. I really believe that we need to get farmers actually planting rather than investment companies, because you’re going to have land abandonment if you don’t actually go that route.

Nate Hegyi: Essentially, what he wants… is to make trees a part of the farming lifestyle.

MUX Sweeper

Nate Hegyi: this is this the land right here?

Liam Byrne: Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: Okay, so it's really close to town.

Nate Hegyi: Donal wanted to show me what this looked like, so he took me to a sprawling farm in county Wicklow - about an hour south of Dublin.

And that’s where we saw sheep grazing but also… acres and acres of trees.

Donal Magner: don't know if you know of a film called Cocaine Bear.

I do know cocaine. [00:24:11-00:24:22] Bear. Much of that was made in an Irish forest. And I think some of it was made here where they've actually. So so you can see I haven't seen it myself. It's got mixed reviews here.

Nate Hegyi: I can see why they would film here. Because unlike those plantations I saw in Leitrim… this looks like a real deal forest.

Yes, there are some Sitka spruce, but also some native scotch pine,

Liam Byrne: we have oak, we have Holly, we have Rowan,

Nate Hegyi: That’s Liam Byrne. He and his three brothers are local forestry contractors tending trees kind of the way you tend sheep.

Liam Byrne: we have overstory trees from The 1800s. We have mid-storey trees from the 1960s.

Nate Hegyi: They’re practicing something called continuous cover forestry. Think of it as permaculture for logging.

Instead of clearcutting… you go in and selectively cut trees

Liam Byrne: it's giving us an economic return. But we're actually allowing the forest to develop ecologically as well.

Nate Hegyi: Continuous cover forestry is beginning to catch on in Ireland. Even the folks in the Save Leitrim group say this kind of agroforestry - where farmers have control over their farms - is great.

And for Liam… who lives in town… whose nephew works for him… who probably gets a Guinness every once in a while at the local pub… this is the future of Ireland’s forests.

Liam Byrne: If there's one word I feel in here is sustainable, I feel it's truly sustainable. And I mean that economically and ecologically.

Nate Hegyi: Walking through this forest… I can’t help but think it must look a little like the woodlands that grew on this island thousands of years ago. But of course with a American twist… some Sitka Spruce.

MUX

Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported and produced by me Nate Hegyi. It was edited by Taylor Quimby (who yes was wearing a scally cap though he says he bought it in France)

Taylor is the executive producer of Outside/In… Rebecca Lavoie is head of on-demand audio at NHPR.

A special thanks to Hagen O’Neill who took me out to a bog in Ireland for some really fun reporting that ultimately did not make this episode.

Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Hanke and Kate Dario.

Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio