‘I WAS NEARLY KILLED TRYING TO SAVE MY SHEEP FROM THE FIRE’
A FARMER has described how he was nearly burned alive while trying to rescue his sheep from the wildfire that damaged half of the land of Killarney National Park at the weekend.
Gene Tangney said some of his sheep are missing and now fears they were killed in the blaze, which destroyed more than 2,500 hectares of land.
Mr Tangney spent the weekend trying to save his sheep from being engulfed by the fire.
‘It was frightening. What was doing all the harm was the strong wind. You could be there quenching the fire and the next thing the wind would change and fire would be on you and you would have to save your own life then, it was that bad,’ he told Radio Kerry yesterday. ‘Sheep are scorched and maybe even lost because sheep are missing.’
He described how a local school also had a ‘tight escape’ as the flames came close to it. ‘If it wasn’t for the fire rescue and the park rangers, everything would have been burned,’ he said.
Mr Tangney lives in the Black Valley near Killarney and keeps his sheep on land near the Upper Lake at the top of the Purple Mountain in the Kerry park. The fire spread from the southern side of the 25,000-hectare park northwards over Purple Mountain.
Yesterday, the Irish Farmers’ Association said the devastating fire was not caused by farmers setting fire to gorse.
The IFA was reacting to social media comments in which some people blamed farmers for the blaze, which ravaged one of Ireland’s most sensitive ecosystems.
The park was declared free from fire yesterday after huge blazes had swept through some of its most prized areas of fauna.
Speaking to Radio Kerry, Kenny Jones, the chairman of Kerry IFA, said that farmers were devastated by the fire and called for compensation for those affected. He also said there were no firebreaks or
other measures to stop the spread of the blaze.
He also strongly rejected claims on Facebook that farmers had started the fires on farmland adjacent to the national park.
‘I would just like to say while I have the opportunity, the social media at the moment, how disappointing it is to see the farmerbashing that’s going on the last couple of days, for want of a better phrase,’ he said.
‘It seems as if this fire was started inside the park by accident or whatever, and hopefully an investigation by the guards will find out as to the cause of the fire. Farmers beside the park are big losers here as well, the loss of grazing and making their land ineligible for payment purposes and so on.’
Mr Jones said it would make no economic sense for farmers to start fires at this time of the year.
‘Nobody wants to burn at this time of the year because it would be months before this area was burnt would green up,’ he added, also saying the Government should assist farmers who lost grazing land to the fire. He said: ‘We in IFA will be fighting to get compensation on behalf of these farmers. It was burnt in circumstances beyond our control.
‘Where the park is built, there’s 26,000 acres under the control of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and it seems from what we can gather... there was no management plan in place for this area. There were no firebreaks, or access points for a catastrophe of this nature, it was burning for two days before it got to the periphery and the fire tenders could get in, the only access was from there.
‘Management of our mountains as with regards grazing and controlled burning needs to continue, otherwise we will have a repeat of this situation in the future.’