THE HOT DRY spell at the end of May was, for many people, welcome sunshine after a particularly wet and miserable winter. However, the flip side of the nice weather is the near inevitability with which it is accompanied by large fires on the hills.

A blaze engulfed the south Dublin Mountains as well as areas of Wicklow in what the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) described as “lit intentionally, destroying hundreds of hectares of habitat and all associated animals, insects and plants within it”.

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Another fire, reportedly caused by disposable barbecues, incinerated Bray Head. A fire earlier in the year took out an area of Mount Leinster in Co Carlow, a location that reliably goes up in flames every year.

Shocking and disruptive as these fires are, they are nothing new. According to the European Forest Fires Information System, 4,355 hectares of land in Ireland were burned in 31 fires.

This number is lower than in 2011 (the first year for which statistics are available) but is the highest recorded since 2017. In that year, in a formal complaint to the European Commission, the Irish Wildlife Trust, an environmental NGO, noted 97 fires that they had gathered evidence for from 19 counties. 40% of them were in areas ‘protected’ for nature conservation.

The recent fire at Bray Head. Wicklow Fire Service Wicklow Fire Service

In the last decade, some things have changed. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) now issues alerts in the run-up to dry spells with appeals for ‘vigilance’.

Farmers with land that has been burnt have their subsidy payments deducted. In 2025, a record 283 farmers were penalised for having burnt land, a sharp increase from 52 the year........

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