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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I think as a good starting point would be to get a handle on how many cats are in Ireland, how many are free roaming, how many are part of a household and how many are furled.
I think that would be a really, really useful start because it's like anything, when you have no baseline figures, it's very hard to come up with a sensible plan and bring everybody around the table and see what cat owners think is
is feasible or responsible and see from a conservation point of view what we believe to be responsible.
But it starts with talking and getting around together and those baseline figures are hugely important.
Yeah, yeah, they will certainly do that.
They will also keep the population, I suppose, of our birds down as well.
So it's to have that balanced conversation.
They will, I mean, our mice and our rats, and I don't know exactly when cats were first introduced to Ireland, who brought them in and for what exactly.
But I mean, they are, I suppose, always been this, you know, out in the farmyard, maybe hunting rats or hunting mice in the house in the evenings, but also hunting birds and hunting other native wildlife.
So it's one of those things that in order to get a handle on what you're dealing with, I suppose, probably need to have an in-depth look into what they're hunting, how they're hunting.
And that can be done, you know, in modern times through GPS collaring and these sort of things.
Yeah, we would do a lot of surveying early morning, at night and late evenings.
And when you're going down country lanes that are remote areas, I mean, not necessarily really close to any sort of built up areas, our nest protection officers and our survey workers would report cats really, really frequently.
And these cats aren't, you know, sitting in somebody's house or sitting outside somebody's house.
They're out in the countryside.
They're on our lanes.
They're in our fields.
So those cats are actively hunting.
And when we look at predation pressure and we're looking at the pressures that other, you know, native predators put on these birds, we need to start folding in, well, what is the pressure that non-native species put on it?
You know, and then the Breeding Waiter EAP has a bolt-on project in collaboration with the National Association of Regional Game Councils and the NPWS
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