Gormley’s Wildlife (Amendment) Bill contains two hunting Bans, not one.19th May 2010


The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment, Heritage and Local Government, chaired by Deputy Seán Fleming (Fianna Fáil) is to meet next Tuesday to discuss a second ban on deer hunting that has been slipped into the recently published Wildlife (Amendment) Bill 2010.

The three main organisations representing the country’s deer hunters have written to the Minister for the Environment, John Gormley TD, and to the political parties seeking urgent meetings to discuss a proposed restriction on deer stalking. The organisations opposing the restriction are the Wild Deer Association of Ireland, the Irish Deer Society and the National Association of Regional Game Councils. They are being supported in their opposition by Countryside Alliance Ireland.

As expected, the Wildlife (Amendment) Bill contains the commitment in the Renegotiated Programme for Government to ban the Ward Union Staghounds. However, it has become clear that the Bill also proposes to make it an offence to use more than one dog while stalking deer with rifles.  

It is a recognised and long established procedure that, where two or three stalkers hunt together, they each could be accompanied by a tracker dog while deer stalking. The dogs are used for the humane purpose of rapidly locating a wounded animal so that it can be reached quickly, not for tracking live deer. It is a requirement of hunting leases issued by Coillte that a hunter is either accompanied by a tracking dog or that they have ready access to a tracking dog when stalking deer.

A spokesman for the Wild Deer Association of Ireland said: ‘The enactment of such a provision will have a devastating effect on deer stalking as it is practised today. This proposal has come completely out of the blue and has caused consternation among deer hunters. It was not included in the Renegotiated Programme for Government. The Minister has not consulted with us nor, insofar as we can establish, with Coillte or his own National Parks and Wildlife Service’.

In the media release announcing the publication of the Bill, the Minister for the Environment claimed that ‘the legislation will have no implications... for deer stalking’. This is patently incorrect. Mr Gormley has either not read the Bill properly or he does not really understand what he is doing.


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