Gormley’s Wildlife (Amendment) Bill 2010 does not stand scrutiny
20th April 2010

The RISE! Rural Says Enough! campaign notes that the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley TD, has published the Wildlife (Amendment) Bill 2010. This is the Bill to give effect to the ban on the Ward Union Hunt contained in the Renegotiated Programme for Government concluded last year by Fianna Fáil and the Green Party.

In his media release, the Minister has cited two reasons for introducing the Bill. Neither of them stands up to scrutiny.

Public safety: The Minister has focussed unduly on no more than two or three incidents that occurred out of more than 400 hunts conducted over the last ten years. At the same time, the Minister is taking no action to tackle the real public safety issue of motorists colliding with scores of deer on major thoroughfares each year, including an average of 50 each year in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

The Ward Union Hunt has implemented a wide range of health and safety measures in recent years and is willing to see what further measures can be identified in discussions with the Minister’s Department, the Garda Síochána and the Road Safety Authority. Banning the hunt in order to address concerns over public safety is an excessive and unfair response.

Animal welfare: Over recent years, each hunt conducted by the Ward Union has been closely monitored by Government inspectors and their reports, consistently, have not identified animal welfare issues.   Veterinarians from the Department of Agriculture and Food conducted a major study of every deer hunted during the 1997/98 and reported that the health of the deer did not appear to be affected in either the short or the long term after hunting.

A spokesperson for RISE! said: ‘The Minister should drop his pretence of being concerned about road safety and animal welfare and admit his real agenda – a basic aversion to all forms of hunting and traditional rural sports.’

Publication of the Bill is no more than a necessary step towards implementing the commitment in the Renegotiated Programme for Government. There is a long way to go yet and the Minister has many legislative and political hurdles to overcome before he might be in a position to enact the legislation.

We welcome the statement by Fine Gael that they oppose the Bill and will – if it is enacted – repeal it if they are in Government. We call on other political parties to give a similar commitment. In particular, we believe that Fianna Fáil TDs and Senators should not allow themselves to be sleepwalked into supporting a Bill that is a first step towards destroying our other rural pastimes.

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