Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

My solution is to ban coursing outright. I speak as a Deputy who represents the only part of Dublin where this practice still continues. The Irish Council Against Blood Sports has a video of this barbarity in Balbriggan, which is in my constituency. It shows agitated hares running up and down within the confines of a coursing field while coursing members shout and scream at them in that enclosure. With regard to the number of hares released back to the wild, many of those hares are in a very distressed state and die afterwards. This has also been stated by officials from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. In Nenagh, for example, some of those released included heavily pregnant hares, which the Minister has told us are supposed to be protected. The rules do not serve to protect the hares in that regard, and how could they when we have greyhounds weighing 60 to 88 lbs and travelling at 43 mph, which can do a hell of a lot of harm, even if they wear a muzzle, to a hare that weighs approximately 6 lbs. The protections are really not worth what is claimed, and this is one of the reasons the Irish hare - a unique race of mountain hare - is now becoming extinct, even though on one hand we say it should be protected.

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