There's some shadow boxing going on across the water about a proposal to reintroduce - you'd never believe it - wolves. Scotland is the place chosen, and those behind the proposal can quote a directive of the EU on Species and Habitats, under which the government is bound to consider the possibilities for reintroducing locally extinct species. You've read about efforts to increase the bear numbers in the Pyrenees by importing them from Eastern Europe, but wolves! They exist in the wild in the mountains of northern Italy and have been trickling into France and even Switzerland, where they may have wild spaces to roam. But wolves in Scotland!
Scottish voices have been raised to show that it is an idea deriving from England, that Scotland should be the new home of the wolf. Sinclair Dunnett, of Caledonian Wildlife, says the body that was trying to do it is based in Oxford and that it is a typical example of Garden of Edenitis, spoken with an English accent. The Scottish Crofters' Union and the National Farmers' Union of Scotland are vigorously opposed and "horrified." The pro wolf people say there is a legal and moral duty to bring back an animal that has been exterminated by humans; those against suggest that if the idea were put into practice, a start might be made in the more fertile landscapes of the Wiltshire Downs or the Kentish Weald. Not in the Scottish back garden.
All this is laid out in the March issue of the Field (the English one), and while it's unlikely any Irish voice will be raised in favour of the wolf, that directive applies to us and will go into our law.
When was the last wolf killed in Ireland? James Fairley in his Irish Beast Book enjoys himself relating many stories of many "last" wolves but "clearly, detective work is a couple of hundred years too late." You could say, on reading his pages, that the last wolf went on throughout the whole of the 18th century.
What would you reintroduce? What about the bittern? And, if we are not careful, a generation from now, we may be agitating for the re introduction of that extinct species the sea trout.