‘There will come a point when we won’t have any ash left in Ireland’

As ash dieback continues to wipe out ash plantations all over the country, forestry growers are demanding a more co-ordinated response on mitigation and compensation measures

Aday is coming when ash trees could face extinction in Ireland. That is the shocking prediction of Offaly farmer Tony Garahy, whose plantation became infected with ash dieback late last year.

Mr Garahy began planting trees on his drystock farm at Leabeg, just outside Tullamore, more than 30 years ago, building his plantation acre by acre until he had more than 100 acres under trees.

A lover of native species, he planted a section of his farm with a mixture of ash and rowan about ten years ago, and was devastated in November last when he discover the presence of ash dieback, a chronic fungus disease that has devastated ash plantations across Europe in the last 20 years.

“Last summer the trees went into leaf as usual and then started dying. I suspected what was wrong and I had a forester come look at them in

November and that confirmed it,” he told the Farming Independent.

“I had been expecting it. I have relatively young trees and they tend to show the infection quicker than mature trees, which can withstand it for a longer time.

“I think we will come to a point, and I don’t know when, where we won’t have any ash left in Ireland. I am fearful for the future. It seems to me that we will have the same situation with ash as we had with Dutch elm disease. Over a period of a few years, all ash trees in Ireland will suffer.”

Resistance

Ash dieback was first scientifically identified in 2006 but is understood to have been present in Europe since the late 1980s or early ’90s. It is an easily spread fungus which causes ash trees to lose their leaves and eventually die.

In infected areas of mainland Europe, the disease has already killed up to 85pc of the ash growing in plantations and 69pc in the wild.

Stronger and larger trees are more resistant but there is no known treatment or effective way of containing the spread of the infection.

Mr Garahy claims the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service are struggling to come up with an effective way of handling the crisis.

“I will be guided by the advice of the Forest Service but they are not sure what they are doing themselves, it seems to me. They seem to be at sixes and sevens over this,” he said.

“We are getting no information, no advice from anyone about this. As a forestry owner I haven’t received any correspondence about how to deal with this at all.

“There is not a county in the country that doesn’t have ash dieback at this stage. I think they [the Forest Service] are just overwhelmed.”

Mr Garahy has a diverse plantation including spruce and a number of different native trees.

While his plantation will take a hit as a result of ash dieback, he says many other forestry owners will be devastated by the disease and are in need of increased support from the Department.

“The ash is thankfully a small part of our overall plantation, but there is absolutely no future for it,” he said.

“It’s not just the expense of replanting. If you have a ten-year-old plantation and that gets wiped out, your profit is ten years further away. If your plantation has been growing for 25 years, that is a really significant loss.

“The profit in growing trees is really in the clear felling at the end of its life cycle. Something like this [having to replant a plantation] would put any profit you ever hoped to generate into the future by however many years.”

‘I am fearful for the future – it seems to me that we will have the same situation with ash as we had with Dutch elm disease’