Rewilding Ireland: How Policy Shifts Could Restore Natural Abundance

Eoghan Daltun stands at a fence line on the Beara Peninsula and sees two worlds. On one side lies commonage—land grazed down to stubble, stripped of trees, ecologically hollowed out. On the other side, behind the fence, the land has been left alone. Bluebells push through. Wood anemone, lesser celandine, dog violet, wood sorrel, primrose, pignut, sanicle, herb Robert, bog asphodel—the names accumulate like a benediction. Self-seeded native trees are establishing themselves. Animals that depend on a functioning ecosystem have returned. The difference between these two landscapes is not geology or climate or soil chemistry. It is a fence. It is policy. It is what humans choose to do, or choose not to do, with the land.

In his new book, Setting the Land Free, Daltun argues that this single observation scales across the entire country. The mechanism is simple: remove grazing animals—sheep, goats, deer—and the land recovers. Stop managing the landscape for extraction and production, and nature begins to reassemble itself. The examples he documents are genuinely uplifting. They show that ecological restoration is not a distant theoretical possibility but something that can happen within years, given the space to happen. This is the core of his argument, and it is also the core of his urgency.

Daltun has spent his career as a rewilding advocate, and this book is his second major statement on the subject, following An Irish Atlantic Rainforest. But where the first book established the vision, this one is more practical and more pointed. It asks: how would this actually work across Ireland? What would need to change? What stands in the way? The answers are not comforting.

The State's management of its own national parks and reserves emerges as a particular target. Daltun does not mince words about what he sees as systematic mismanagement of publicly owned land—landscapes that should be laboratories for ecological recovery but instead remain locked into extractive or maintenance-heavy regimes. The critique is sharp because the contradiction is sharp: the State owns the land, controls the policy, and yet continues to manage it in ways that prevent the very recovery that is now ecologically urgent.

But Daltun is equally unflinching about the harder questions that rewilding raises. Take sika deer. A landscape-scale cull of sika deer would enable significant ecological recovery—the animals are not native, they are numerous, and they prevent regeneration. But a public campaign to kill large numbers of a charismatic species would face fierce resistance. Daltun names this tension directly. He does not pretend it away. He does not offer a comfortable solution. He simply states what is true: some of the changes that would most benefit the land are changes that many people would find difficult to accept.

This refusal to soften the argument is, paradoxically, one of the book's great strengths. Daltun's reasoning is close, cogent, and in the end difficult to refute. He builds his case methodically and delivers it without apology. And the timing matters. The book arrives at a moment when the climate crisis is no longer a future threat but a present reality. The imperative to change policy, to redesign the systems that govern how we use land, to confront the economic interests that benefit from the status quo—all of this has moved from the realm of environmental advocacy into the realm of practical necessity. Daltun is arguing that rewilding is not a luxury or a nice idea. It is climate action. It is a way of working with the regenerative capacity of nature rather than against it. The question is no longer whether we can afford to rewild. It is whether we can afford not to.