Henry O’Donnell is Programme Manager of the ACRES Donegal CP team. He has amassed a large amount of experience for this role through previously managing the Inishowen Uplands EIP-Agri project and working as an agricultural consultant over many years. The Inishowen Uplands project recently joined forces with the Inishowen Development Partnership to successfully submit a tender to deliver the Donegal ACRES CP on the ground in the county. There are currently three Donegal ACRES CP offices staffed by a team with expertise in areas ranging from biodiversity to water quality and everything in between.
CAP Network Ireland recently sat down with Henry in Letterkenny to find out how ACRES Donegal CP is working to enhance biodiversity within the county.
How was the establishment phase of ACRES Donegal CP for you and your team?
The whole concept of ACRES Cooperation was very new to everybody. We had some flavour of it, under the European Innovation Partnerships system and we could see that the ethos was carrying on some of the local activity. We cooperated very much with the other seven CP regions, who were all introduced at the same time and we soon formulated our policies and procedures to get started. It has fallen into place nicely at this point.
Have you noticed any issues that are unique to Donegal?
I suppose from a biodiversity and an environmental point of view, Donegal really is the whole country in microcosm. If we talk about priority environmental assets, Donegal really has them all. We have peatlands, we have the corncrake, we have the curlew and we have high status waters. We have a huge range of very important environmental assets, so it is very interesting trying to manage that. It led us to dividing our Donegal ACRES CP region into sub-regions because there are different priorities in different areas. That has worked out quite well because we know where to target measures according to the environmental measure that we are trying to protect in a particular area.
Can you give us an example of this?
The corncrake is only found in Inishowen and in very specific regions of the west coast so our focus in those areas have to be primarily on the corncrake. If you look at the Curlew, there are only two sites in Donegal so we have to focus on them because it (the species) is so on its last legs.
Peatlands are a huge aspect of Donegal. We have something like 79,000 ha of commonage land, the vast majority of which is peatlands. So we are probably fairly unique there. We have something like a quarter of all the commonage lands in Ireland here in Donegal so that is a huge focus for our team. It is quite a difficult area to plan and work in because we have such a diversity of shareholders but it is something that we are putting more and more into.
What has the response of farmers been like?
Well, the big thing we would say about our farmers in Donegal is their interest in ACRES. We had huge uptake in Tranche 1 and again we had more in Tranche 2. We are in the unique situation where of all the potential farmers in the Donegal CP region, 80% of them have joined ACRES. I think that speaks for itself.
Now farmers, of course, have had issues with some of the implementation of ACRES such as getting used to results based payments. The complexity has also been difficult for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in building systems to deliver payments. ACRES is a massive scheme and it is very complex and the delivery of results based payments to agriculture on such a huge scale has obviously taken a while to settle down.
How has your team coped with these issues on the ground in Donegal?
I suppose that we were very lucky that we had a core team to start off with, who had huge expertise that would be credited on a national level. We started off very strong and we have added to the team in all regions. The experience that they bring to it makes my life as a manager easier, especially when we have people who are really committed and really know the priority assets and how they need to be managed. Our strength as a CP region is our team. We have resources like IT and everything else but at the end of the day our strength is the people working with us and the relationships that they are building with the farming community. It is hugely important.
Which stage of delivery is Donegal ACRES CP at right now in 2025?
We have had a couple of rounds where farmers can apply for non-productive investments which are the relatively simple measures that deliver for environmental assets in Donegal.
We are moving now in 2025 to the introduction of landscape actions which are more complex and are actions that maybe involve more than one farmer. It could be a group of farmers in a catchment, it could be farmers in a commonage and obviously some of the priority farmers could be in the corncrake region where the LIFE project is coming to an end in 2025 and the ACRES CP team is stepping into that void to provide supports for those farmers.
The other thing that we are doing in 2025 (this is year 3) is that we have to rescore 60% of the land that is commonage land in Donegal, which is something like 42,000 ha to score. We are currently organising to do that over the summer. That in itself is quite an undertaking. It is in the parameters of the scheme as has been laid down in the CAP Strategic Plan 2023-2027 that commonage land, and indeed land that is in the results-based payment must be scored in years 1, 3 and 5. It’s a busy summer all round for our team and for advisors dealing with ACRES farmers as well.
There will be another round for farmers to apply for non-productive investments in the Autumn as well so there’s lots going on. I do feel that we are trying to make up for lost time because some of this has been more complex than anybody had envisaged and the delivery of landscape actions has been a bit slower than we hoped.
How confident are you that all this hard work being carried out by your team and participant farmers will result in an improvement in biodiversity in Donegal?
I am very confident because, as I said, 80% of potential farmers in the CP region have actually joined the scheme and there is an opportunity there to make a real difference. It is not just one or two farmers here and there doing their bit for biodiversity, it’s the vast majority and that has to yield results. A lot of the farming systems in our CP region are quite amenable to agri-environment actions. We can’t forget that this is also an additional source of income for farmers that is badly needed. I think that the combination of that will ensure that farmers will engage more because there are good incentives there for them.
We hope that some of the glitches can be ironed out ahead of another round of CAP so we could really hit the ground running because it has taken us until now to get things running smoothly.
Is there anything else that you would like people to know about your work in ACRES Donegal CP and the issues you face?
In terms of the peatlands and commonages, this is the first time ever that such a detailed survey has been carried out on these lands. We are amassing huge amounts of information as to the issues and the quality already there and it’s not all bad news. There are huge areas of peatland and commonages in Donegal that are in very good condition.
We do have issues like turbary (long standing rights to cut turf for fuel) which has to be mentioned and can be very contentious. I have to say that in my mind this is more of a just transition issue and that this issue is much bigger than ACRES CP and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. If we are serious about protecting our upland peatlands those people (consumers of turf) need alternatives, and they need support. This support has to come if we are serious about protecting our peatlands and getting them to a very high ecological standard. As I said, this issue is much bigger than ACRES CP and I think that our policymakers need to take that on board.
To learn more about ACRES, click here.
Source of images: ACRES Donegal CP
