Environment

Bridget Ginnity on steps you can take to have a gorgeous garden without the chemical input It’s well into summer now, and gardens and laneways are in full bloom, with butterflies and bees hopping from flower to flower. Most Clare households have gardens and they’re often a source of great pleasure. When walking about, we also have the benefit of other people’s gardens but without the work, which is perhaps even better. A few generations ago, gardens were either the manicured estates of the big houses or cottage gardens. In cottage gardens, every corner of the garden was planted and what thrived survived, what struggled was taken over. As society became better off and urbanised, the trend began for manicured gardens but nature is a bit like a teenager’s bedroom – it descends to chaos very quickly. Chemical pesticides came along and helped us have the order of a big house garden without the manpower. The term “pesticide” covers chemical …

Fish stocks in Irish seas are reducing. Bridget Ginnity highlights changes we can all make to reverse the situation CLARE man Ken O’Sullivan brought the wonders of our seas to our living rooms with his film Ireland’s Deep Atlantic (see trailer below), as did David Attenborough with Blue Planet. Despite the plentiful sea life off west Clare, those who have fished for decades don’t need statistics to know there are a lot fewer fish in the sea nowadays. Locals talk about salmon leaping up the rivers when they were young, but these stories are becoming a distant memory and wild salmon for dinner is a novelty. Is there anything we can do to help matters, to have our seas and rivers filled with fish again? There are a lot of reasons for the decline including pollution and climate change, but most fingers point to industrial scale overfishing. Are there plenty more fish the sea? A complex system of quotas governs …