“I couldn’t be described as kind. If you were describing me in three words, kind wouldn’t be one of them. I’m not a bit agreeable. If someone gets something wrong, I’ll jolly well put them right.”
Thank goodness: “being kind” is way overrated, and tends to bland down critical faculties, whipping the oomph outta life.
Éanna Ní Lamhna is not bland, and she has loads of oomph. She’s laughing, about musing earlier on whether this was to be one of those Q&A interviews, asking to describe yourself in three words. “Thirty-three words’d be better.” What else? “The only person I’d like to play me in a biopic and it’s too late is Maggie Smith. Sure I’m an auld bat, and Maggie Smith is great. She’s an auld bat too and she has the same acerbic wit.”
Ní Lamhna is feisty, funny, interesting, smart, idiosyncratic, charming and fun, bursting with knowledge, erudition and well-founded opinion, expressed with character and confidence. The wildlife expert, biologist, broadcaster and author is great company, warm and likable. Turn on the radio and her voice is instantly recognisable: the Louth accent, the irrepressible enthusiasm, racing at 3,000 miles an hour, a torrent of words without stopping, bamboozling you but making you think, and smile. A gifted communicator.
She’s just home in suburban Dublin suburb after driving to Waterford and back for three back-to-back school visits. What’s the secret to her energy? “If you’re interested in something and you want to do it, you do it. I’m doing things I like doing. You can sleep when you’re dead. I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘no’, as my poor husband says.” While she was out the first copy of her new book arrived from publishers Gill. “Look at it. Isn’t it deadly?” The Great Irish Biodiversity Book is large format and handsome, beautifully illustrated by Barry Falls. It’s structured around habitats: woodlands, bog lands, seaside, gardens and parks, grasslands, rivers and lakes, with scenes or displays of plants, insects and animals – herbivores, carnivores and decomposers. “The root of ecology is, the plants make the food and the animals eat it, and the decomposers break it down. So you have a carbon cycle.”
This is not a Mary Had a Little Lamb book for kids. This is a proper book written to appeal to everybody
Falls’s detailed, accurate illustrations are throughout. “He did a great job. The poor man, I was on his back. These don’t have that many legs, that’s the wrong colour, that doesn’t exist, where’d you get that? He has a high place in heaven for doing this.” While ostensibly for fifth class and upwards, Ní Lamhna writes in a broad, universal style. “And that will do adults. You can read this, and you can go out and see all these things.”
She recalls older children’s books being “full of inaccuracies ... Spiders were all wrong, for instance. A spider has a head and a body and eight legs. Where are the legs, on its head or its body?” It’s the first of several quizzy questions that throw me. (For reference: spiders’ legs come from their head.) “Little Miss Moffett or Incy Wincy Spider had legs coming out the side of him, and two eyes when he should have eight. They told you squirrels hibernated, and squirrels don’t. What are they collecting nuts for if they’re going to be asleep for five months? And they told you frogs hibernate, and they do, at the bottom of ponds. But how come they don’t drown?”
She insisted on calling it The Great Irish Biodiversity Book, “not the great Irish book of nature. I had a big fight with them. Oh, that’s too hard of a word,” she says scathingly of the publisher’s line. “It’s not too hard of a word. The world and his mother knows what biodiversity is.”
She wanted that title “because it’s a serious book, even if it’s presented accessibly. It’s the book of the biodiversity we have in Ireland, the different habitats where they live. This is a science book for kids. It’s not just a whole lot of plants and animals. It’s where they are.”
There’s solid science. “I write for ordinary people. I’m not writing for professors. This is not a Mary Had a Little Lamb book for kids. This is a proper book written to appeal to everybody.”
“I haven’t gone to town saying we’re all going to hell in a handcart and the world is nearly over. I have been very positive. The point was to show the great biodiversity we have. I haven’t said they’re nearly all gone in certain places. I’ve said go out and see them. And then if you go out and there’s no curlews, you might say, well, why are there no curlews?” Too much bad news makes people fatalistic, which does no good. The only hint is the dedication to her grandchildren: “Archie, Shay, Hugo, Alice, Teddy, Charles and Tilly. I hope you will get to visit the many wildlife habitats described here, and that all these plants and animals, and the places they live in, will still be there for you to show to your grandchildren.”
She has lived in Dublin since college, but is originally from Louth. She segues immediately into an impenetrable Louth accent. “If I went home now I’d be back saying Wather and Buther.” Also, “someone said, you always sound like you’re giving out. I’m speaking with passion. Most people only speak with passion when they’re giving out”, whereas she speaks enthusiastically, quickly. A motormouth.
As a child she had a lisp. “No one knew anything I was saying at all. I was a country girl, most of them were townies in class. My father taught me in school, and he was the master.” She tells a funny-awful story involving a lisp, and the elocution teacher forcing her in front of the class to repeat a tongue-twister, warning: ‘Girls, if you don’t do what I tell you, you’ll end up talking like her.’ “The nerve of her,” Ní Lamhna says now, still affronted. “And I’m the only one in that bloody class who’s earning my living from talking. You can see why I don’t tolerate fools. Imagine doing that to someone. By gum, they didn’t get away with it.”
[ The curlew’s call is giving way to silence but not everyone is giving upOpens in new window ]
We’re sitting at her kitchen table, beside the small garden. “The husband does all the flowers.” A biodiverse garden doesn’t have to be wild. “I think insects are all Tipperary or Roscommon or Clare supporters. It’s yellows and purples they love, but they can’t see red. Did you ever see a bee in a rose, a tulip, a begonia? Those things that gardeners invent because God made a mistake and didn’t make enough red flowers.”
She’s a woman on a mission. “If I am, I’ve failed badly. In 1970 we had twice as much biodiversity as we have now. Twice as much: 90 per cent of our curlews are gone. We hardly have any corncrakes. You couldn’t sleep for the racket of them 50 years ago. And this is because of land-use change, not so much climate change in Ireland. We had hay fields long ago; there was plenty of cover for corncrakes and curlews that nest on the ground. Now if you’ve got a field that gets a number-one haircut in May, which is what silage is, then there’s no cover and the birds have declined enormously. That’s happened on my watch.”
On the other hand, awareness has improved, along with initiatives such as No Mow May, giving biodiversity a chance, and “not be calling dandelions horrible names. A weed is a plant in the wrong place. Where are dandelions supposed to live? It’s just hate language.” And on she goes, about how great dandelions are for bumblebees, hunting yellow flowers, but “bloody daffodils are pure useless for bees. There’s no pollen.” Hay meadows and hedges are gone. But she’s not anti-farmer, saying much is down to fluctuating EU regulations:
“It’s not black and white. The farmers are not baddies and the environmentalists goodies.”
Ní Lamhna keeps many plates spinning. Trustee of the Tree Council. Communications officer with Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (“The rat catchers.” She marvels at residents “blaming the Corpo” while bins overflow. “As a rat, why would you eat poison when you could eat bags of chips?”). An honorary doctorate from University of Galway next month. She took over Irish Times readers’ queries when Ethna Viney retired; it has since expanded so she can answer fully, plus “more space to make smart remarks!”
[ Best way to fight biodiversity loss is with a change of mindsetOpens in new window ]
She’s been on RTÉ Radio 1′s Mooney Goes Wild for nearly 30 years, since they sourced her in “an RTÉ book of women who could do things”, which amuses her. She was the only woman on Mooney then, and remains so. “In those days, anything about wildlife was said in Latin” and there was hoo-ha about “talking about wildlife in a way ordinary people understood”, rather than academics “minding their arses” with caveats. “I always say everything for definite.”
A photo on the wall is “the whole jolly lot”, including two sons and a daughter, partners and seven grandchildren (one in-vitro). They sound like fun grandparents, organising crab races, collecting snails in a bucket. “We get great value with them.”
Her book acknowledges “my patient husband John Harding, who fears, with some justification, that I shall never retire”. That’ll only happen “when people stop wanting me. You’re only as good as your last gig.” They met in science at UCD; he specialised in physics, she in botany and microbiology. She points at another photo. “That’s what I looked like then. Wasn’t I gorgeous?” She talks about youth, curiosity, knowing everything.
Younger people are all so busy, “but they don’t have the confidence people get when they get older.” When did she get confidence? “Oh, I suppose I was always a show-off, to tell you the truth.”
The Great Irish Biodiversity Book By Éanna Ní Lamhna and illustrated by Barry Falls is published by Gill
