Bad hare day
Charles Moore
In another week, says the physiotherapist, I can hunt again. But until that time, I brood. Now that I have heard of Angela Smith, I brood some more,
Thanks to the vagaries of devolution, the power to ban hunting is dispersed in the United Kingdom. For England and Wales, the legislator is the Westminster Parliament. In Scotland, it is the Scottish Parliament, whose ban on killing with hounds has led to far more foxes being flushed out and killed by guns than ever died by the former means. In Ulster, however, the power rests with the Northern Ireland Assembly. This fact had led me to believe that, if hunting were banned at Westminster, the province might be the last place in the country where it would carry on. Although there are Paisleyites and Sinn Feiners who oppose hunting (it is always the more extreme parties in which the tendency is strongest), a ban does not seem high on any party's list of priorities. North or South, the Irish like to hunt.
But at present devolved government in the province is suspended and direct rule applies. That is where Angela Smith comes in. A former employee of the League Against Cruel Sports, she is now a Northern Ireland minister, and the environment is one of her responsibilities. Mrs Smith has presented the Irish hare with a special protection order, which means that she (the Irish hare, not Mrs Smith) may no longer be 'killed, taken, sold or purchased'. She invokes the 'precautionary principle', claiming that numbers of Irish hares are at low levels and that her ban will fulfil the 'species action plan', which will double their population by 2010.
It is a puzzle how Mrs Smith, who is the Labour MP for Basildon, knows what is best for the Irish hare, for the decision is entirely her own. She did not consult any of the political parties about it (she actual
ly complained that opposition to her order had been the one issue that had brought all four political parties in the province together), nor the Irish Hare Group that interests itself in these matters, and she is not supported by any of the relevant scientific experts. Rather than Tony Blair's Big Conversation, this was Angela Smith's monologue. It is also unclear how she will know what has happened to the poor beast in 2010 for she has just banned her best means of collecting information.
Every year the Dungannon Coursing Club nets hares for its sport. When it does so, in a project with Queen's University, Belfast, it worms them, sexes them, takes DNA samples to check on disease and fits some with a radio transmitter to track their progress. This research has already established, contrary to League claims, that hares do not die of fright after being coursed. More important, it accumulates information, including population numbers, which can contribute to the species' welfare. Needless to say, such decline of numbers as has taken place is chiefly attributable to changes in agriculture; in coursing, 0.015 per cent of hares coursed are killed. Last year, the Coursing Club won a conservation award. This year, its work is illegal.
Confusion has resulted. Beagle packs and harriers are not sure where they stand legally, since killing is banned but the chase isn't. Poor old Dungannon Coursing Club at first pursued the obvious route of doing its work in the South. Angela Smith hopes to create A Nation Once Again, an Ireland united against the wickedness of coursing, but her counterparts in the Republic are not paying the slightest heed. There the sport is so popular that the national meeting is said to earn the town of Clonmel 12 million euro in a weekend and a top dog earns half a million euros at stud. Coursing is safe in the South. So the Dungannon boys simply crossed the border, netted their hares in Co. Monaghan and brought them back to the club's paddock. Now, though, they fear that even this may be illegal, and so they have taken all the hares back to a meeting in Co, Cavan. Is there a single Irish hare sleeping more comfortably in her form as a result of all this?
Normally one would trust to what Somerville and Ross called 'the magnificent superiority of the Irish mind to the trammels of officialdom, and the inveterate supremacy in Ireland of the personal element', but we are dealing with New Labour here, and so instead it will be a matter of judicial review and money for lawyers before this is sorted out. It needs to be, because if Angela Smith can decide to 'save' the Irish hare on a whim and without evidence, she or somebody else (and not only in Northern Ireland) could try to do the same to any other beast, equally regardless of opinion, knowledge, sport, livelihood or the animal's actual welfare. As the poet said, 'Chuck it, Smith!'
Previous page
