Oisín O'Neill
speaker
171 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Oisín O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The key then is really for people to identify invasive species, because when you plant an invasive species in the garden, that's the one that's going to escape into your local ecosystem and cause so much damage.
And there are great resources for this on the National Biodiversity Data Centre website.
And if people can just familiarise themselves with some of the more well-known, highly invasive species that are unfortunately still for sale in garden centres, that is a really, really great start.
And this is what we were trying to encourage people to do last week.
Thanks for the question, Eina.
So I think it's important, yeah, we get this question a lot, like what exactly is an invasive species and what is a naturalised species, for example.
And the understanding we would have of an invasive species, which aligns with the
official definition of an invasive species that it's a species that's brought into the new environment usually by humans, it spreads quickly and it actually ultimately causes harm to nature, the economy or the human health and it can have a net negative impact on the local ecosystem.
But you're correct that there are species that have come to Ireland and they were brought by humans.
And other examples, of course, include the hedgehog, which was brought to Ireland, and the rabbit.
And we have trees such as beech trees and sycamore trees.
But these species don't necessarily...
cause so much damage to the environment.
They don't necessarily out-compete things and cause a net negative impact on the local flora and on the local fauna.
So with things like naturalized species, these aren't the problem.
It's your other species.
When we're talking about mammals and you spoke,
about the vole well when you look at the mink and the devastation that the mink has caused and that the mink escaped from fur farms originally and then when you mentioned the rhododendron you look at what rhododendron does it inhibits everything else and it covers it covers landscapes really and it spreads uncontrollably
So these things leave no space for the native flora, they leave no space for the native fauna, and these are what are considered invasive.
And when you have other species that don't really damage the environment to the same extent, and they actually kind of become part of the ecosystem and can often have positive effects for the ecosystem by providing prey, then these would be understood as being naturalised and not invasive.
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