Owen Murphy

speaker

684 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Owen Murphy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Claire Byrne Show · A Cat the most destructive, invasive predators in the natural world · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, look, we face this thing when it comes to predation and predation pressure on some of our ground nesting birds.

we're constantly having these conversations.

So it's certainly not the first time I've talked to people about cats and the ability of cats to hunt and kill a lot of our native species.

Yeah, in a lot of cases.

And I suppose there's two aspects to this.

We have domesticated cats that live at home and are fed and are looked after.

And we also have a very high population of feral cats.

So they're domestic cats, but they live in the wild or they live semi-wild.

They come in and out of houses occasionally to get food, but they spend a lot of their time hunting.

So it's probably useful to distinguish between the two of them.

But people, I suppose in general, they love their pets.

We all love our pets.

and they can get their backs up a little bit if you're pointing the finger at their pets and saying they're causing a downward pressure.

But we all need to be realistic and I suppose we need to be adult and we need to start the conversation of what the impact these cats are having on native birds.

And I suppose a lot of people don't realise that although cats are with us for quite a long time, they aren't native to Ireland.

So they're a non-native predator

And if they're just allowed to roam and do whatever they want in the countryside, they will have a negative impact on our native creatures.

And I suppose it's important to say that some of the native creatures that I'm talking about have declined so much in population over the last 40 or 50 years that they're teetering on the brink of being extinct as breeding species in Ireland.

So they're right on the edge.

No, I mean, I don't have figures for exactly what our cat population in Ireland is.

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