The proposed Rights of Nature amendment to the Constitution

The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss recommends that nature become a holder of rights under our constitution. I couldn’t agree more, and I hope that a referendum is called.

If the people approve the necessary amendment to Bunreacht Na hÉireann, the Oireachtas will have to enact legislation to give effect to it.

But will the rights of nature be truly respected by our politicians when they knuckle down to addressing this profound ecological issue?

If the task is approached honestly and without undue interference from ‘ nod- and-wink’ elements or powerful vested interests, the constitutional ‘Rights of Nature’ amendment should see an end to some of the vilest practices that human beings have devised to wreak havoc on our native wildlife.

Fox hunting should end as a consequence, because it is clearly unnatural to train a dog to attack and kill another dog, as happens in this ‘sport’. The fox is a dog, albeit a wild or undomesticated one; and hounds have to be coached from an early age to see it as an enemy. This is achieved by setting young hounds on little fox-cubs, to rip them apart in their dens, thus giving the novice dogs a taste for blood and a lifelong hostility to foxes. So Nature, through her legal rep, would have to say ‘no’ to fox-hunting. Likewise coursing would have to go. Though hares run from predators, it is entirely unnatural to snatch them from their natural habitats, confine them in captivity for weeks at a time and then subject them to a contrived chase, resulting in injury, or in death caused by stress-related ailments when they are released back into the wild.

Again, Nature couldn’t give the thumbs-up to that distorted mirror-image of itself, as it flies in the face of all that is natural.

And Nature couldn’t take kindly to shooters spewing toxic lead across the fields and into rivers and lakes as they blast birds from the sky or turn fleeing animals into clumps of dead or dying tissue...for the craic.

True, various bird and animal species prey upon each other, and that has always been part of nature, but humans intervening to add to the sum total of animal suffering and obliteration of habitat is entirely another matter, as also evidenced by the absence of the Dawn Chorus in areas where ‘sportsmen’ have targeted our singers, quelling those sweet notes that have inspired many a poem and symphony.

Right now, arrogant humans can lord it over the creatures of field and forest, using them as playthings as they strut and ravage across the surface of a planet they have brought to the brink of destruction.

It doesn’t have to be like that. The great Tommy Makem sang that “all God’s creatures have a place in the choir.”

They will, when Nature has her say in court…

Thanking you, John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street, Callan, Co. Kilkenny.