Oisín O'Neill

Hi, Clare.

Thanks for having me on.

So, yeah, as you said, the book is

Sitka spruce, the amazing timber tree, was distributed to primary schools across Ireland.

What it does is it paints a lovely rosy picture of the Sitka spruce tree in a forest, seeing abundant wildlife around it.

But the reality, as many people will tell you, couldn't be further from the truth.

What the book fails to mention is the well-documented serious negative ecological impacts of the Sitka spruce monoculture forestry model and the anger and grief that Irish people feel that our native woodlands have been replaced by this lifeless alien conifer forest.

That may be what they say but the reality is the reports show that there is huge biodiversity loss in Ireland right now and the forestry plantation, the monoculture plantation model is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in Ireland.

Forestry has been identified as one of the top three pressures on Irish waterways with the pine needles changing the chemistry in the water, killing salmon, plantations are sprayed with pesticide and the clear felling model that is still used in Ireland

which was developed in Central Europe, by the way, and not even used there anymore, is seriously, seriously harmful.

It causes huge soil exposure disturbance and is visually horrifying, as many in rural Ireland will tell you.

Well, the book itself gives very much a one-sided picture.

It's an industry-led initiative aimed at the schoolchildren of Ireland that paints one side of the picture.

What it doesn't tell the children is that, in fact, there are seriously negative impacts with this model that we are using in Ireland.

It doesn't tell the schoolchildren of Ireland that citrus spruce is the most common tree in Ireland.

It is a non-native tree.

7% of Ireland is owned by Cuiiltea.

75% of cultural land is covered in Sitka spruce.

What it doesn't say is that we're living within a global biodiversity crisis with biodiversity loss seen as the second most severe global risk according to the World Economic Forum.

And information like this, misinformation like this that is aimed at children risks propagating biodiversity loss.