'Mournes could take centuries to recover from wildfires'

Firefighters have once again been battling wildfires in the Mourne Mountains, with over seven square miles of ground destroyed in the last week.

The immediate damage is clear to see, with heavy palls of smoke hanging over the blackened and charred landscape, but a conservation expert said the long-term damage could take hundreds of years to repair.

Dr Neil Reid from Queen's University Belfast (QUB) said: "If it keeps happening year after year, it's death by a thousand cuts. It's attrition and you're just losing all these peatland specialists."

Covering 57,000 hectares of peatland, gorse, heathland, and forest, the Mournes stretches from Northern Ireland's tallest mountain, Slieve Donard, to the coastline of County Down.

Humans have lived and farmed there for thousands of years, but more recently some have been responsible for the destruction of huge swathes of land through deliberate fires.

It has been described by the Agriculture and Environment minister, Andrew Muir, as "rural arson".

Reid said a recent study of wildfires in the Mournes showed the full extent of the damage caused is not immediately apparent.

"It looks like it's recovered, the heather's back again, but underneath we've got lots of peatland specialists that require the wet conditions.

"What the fire does, is it changes the structure and the chemical composition of the peat itself. As a result it is no longer suitable for those specialist peatland plants."

With wildfires happening year after year, Reid is worried there's never a long enough period for the landscape to recover.

The build-up of peatland happens very slowly, only growing about a millimetre or two every year.

Reid said if several centimetres are lost to fire, then "you're losing decades, centuries, potentially millennia of peatland".

"So you could be looking at decades, centuries, millennia before the actual lost peat itself begins to build back up."

James Fisher is the Lead Ranger for the National Trust (NT), who are one of the larger landowners in the Mournes.

"We saw over a thousand hectares burnt just in the last week which is staggering," he said.

His role was created in the aftermath of a series of wildfires in 2021.

He said the "big hit" caused by fires is to biodiversity, as established rare habitats are wiped out.

"The Mournes itself as an area is less than 1% of the area of Northern Ireland, but it has over 50% of the heathland communities.

"So whenever a fire devastates an area, you're really taking out a huge amount of the special designated habitats."

Following the 2021 fires the NT carried out an intensive monitoring programme, measuring the recovery of the burned heathland. After three years the invertebrate population of that area was still 90% lower.

"So many of the other animals and the plants rely on the invertebrate communities, so they're going to be impacted hugely by that reduction in number," Fisher said.

"It will take a substantial amount of time before those species and communities recover."

The Mournes has been designated as both an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and as an Area of Special Scientific Interest.

Fisher said those designations "have to mean something".

"If this continues, the features that the area is designated for won't be there."

Nigel McKinney from The Mourne Heritage Trust said the destruction caused by this week's wildfires has been devastating.

"Every living thing that's on there is burned.

"A black desert is the wrong term because there's more life in a desert than there'll be up in an incinerated landscape. It's like a moonscape and it's a very large area."

He's concerned about how long it will take for flora and fauna to return.

"The reservoir of rare species, plants, insects, other animals, birds are in our uplands. If that's all incinerated that's a massive impact.

"Good recovery won't happen for many, many years and if it's not managed right it's maybe not going to come back."

The Mournes contains thousands of acres of woodland, some of which is ancient, and which could be at risk in the future because of fires.

As well as being a beautiful place to visit, forests can help prevent soil erosion and flooding by providing a natural barrier in the landscape.

In April 2010 major damage was caused to woodland outside Annalong during a deliberate gorse fire.

Sixteen years on, trees have been replanted, but the director of the Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland, John Martin, said full recovery is a long way off.

"It would be another 20 years potentially for some of those sites to get to a point to what we would describe as an established woodland and delivering all the benefits that it was delivering before,” he explained.

"So we are talking about intergenerational damage here, which is actually just stealing from people's future."

In a more recent blow, a new native woodland in the Mournes funded by the Trust, was destroyed by a deliberate fire.

More than 2000 trees were lost, which Martin describes as a "disaster" for their planting targets.

"In terms of finance, I think it's probably tens of thousands of pounds worth of lost new native woodland planting," he added.

Around 300,000 people visit the Mournes each year for recreational purposes.

Figures from Tourism NI show that in 2024 across the wider Newry, Mourne and Down council area almost 6000 jobs relied on tourism and visitors to the region spent £73.3m.

Vincent McAlinden lives in the Mournes and volunteers with Mountaineering Ireland.

He wants people to be able to enjoy coming to a "high quality recreational environment", but said deliberate wildfires are putting that at risk.

"Aesthetically it's obviously terrible and reputation-wise for the Mournes as a brand it's terrible."

He believes most of the fires are started maliciously to burn vegetation and that people in the wider community have to be vigilant and also be prepared to "call it out, that it's not acceptable".

The law in Northern Ireland states that the burning of vegetation such as heather, gorse, whin or fern may only be carried out between 1 September and 14 April.

Last month, the Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs published its its wildfire action.

It includes dozens of measures aimed at improving resilience and reducing the frequency and severity of fires.

Earlier this week, Muir rejected claims of no consequences for those who start rural fires and said arsonists could face prison in some cases. But added that the authorities need the public's help to bring them to justice.