Dr. Sharon Parr:

I will answer the scrub question first. It is encroaching scrub. We do not actually deal with what we call the established scrub. If one went back 150 years in the Burren, one would hardly see a bush. It is really in the last 100 years that it has been increasing exponentially. If one cuts hazel and does nothing, it will grow more in one year than if one had not cut it. Cutting only encourages it, so one must treat the stumps to stop it regrowing. We have been successful with people doing targeted stump treatments and dealing with what little regrowth there is. If they are organic, they must keep going back to recut every few years. In that way, it stops the plant producing hazelnuts, so one is taking out the seed source and slowing the spread. We have been very successful in holding back what we have taken out.

As regards land abandonment, in some ways we can already see what would happen, which is that the hazel would take over. The funny thing is that the hazel we have in the Burren is in a rare and important international habitat. In conservation, it is a problem of balancing what is most important: the Atlantic hazel woodland or the species-rich grassland.

The Burren's species-rich grasslands have rare plants, which occur elsewhere, but it is the only place in Europe where these plant communities come together due to the climatic interactions that occur. If the hazel scrub continues to spread, we will start to lose those communities. They might not seem that important initially but we do not know what other things are there. A lot of fungi and things like that are being maintained, which are sources of future medicines and products. Essentially, however, over time we would see the Burren going largely to hazel scrub and we would lose all those grasslands. They are nowhere else. In addition, the archaeology would disappear into the scrub with the structures being damaged by growing roots and branches.