GER BUCKLEY WALKS along a forested site he owns with his wife in Limerick.

Stormy weather the night before has damaged some trees and while he speaks the constant whirring of a harvester’s machinery can be heard cleaning up the mess. One of five sites he owns, the overall destruction across about 400 acres of forest is unclear.

It may be a little after 9am and the beginning of a new day, but Buckley gives the impression of a man who’s risen earlier than the sun.

“They were due to come down anyway,” he says, sounding almost relieved.

Forestry isn’t something he inherited. These trees were planted on land previously used for farming, and were it not for other working commitments that compelled Buckley to travel often it may have remained as such.

Thirty years earlier, a renewed governmental interest in Ireland’s measly forest covering had captured his attention. With generous grants available to landowners interested in planting trees, Buckley remembers the advertisements and write-ups still; how they promised long-terms payoffs with relatively less effort required than the running of a farm.

“Of course we all know without being told that money doesn’t grow on trees,” an article advocating forestry in the Southern Star read, “but it’s beginning to look as if it might soon be doing the next best thing.”

For all the caution one might exercise before taking on what remained a significant transition, from the upper reaches of the Irish government down the message was simple: You’d be mad not to do it.

Throughout the first 25 years or so of this arrangement Buckley had felt vindicated for taking the chance. He could look out at these trees and see what amounted to his pension for later in life. He could walk through them – a fecund, flourishing forest – and feel more alive himself.

He doesn’t remember feeling too concerned when the first case of ash dieback disease in Ireland was confirmed in October 2012. There were a number of ash trees scattered across his own sites, admittedly, and the prospect of an airborne pathogen could hardly be disregarded. As he saw it though, the planting of these trees of his had been a collective undertaking. “You enter into a contract with the forest service,” he says, “and you’re obliged to look after it, maintain it and do all the necessary things according to the code of practice.”

Should something with such a potential for widespread destruction as ash dieback come along, he could rest assured that the duty of care would go both ways. That’s how he figured it, anyway.

“If I had the day back,” he insists, “I wouldn’t put a tree in the ground.”

*****

One of the people we most hated coming into this country, Cromwell, left the worst reputation, but he planted this country with ash trees right along the roadside. The fact that he wanted them because they were the proper shape for the stocks of guns is neither here nor there, because he was not around to cut them. Later, the GAA found them very useful for the making of camáns, particularly the run of the grain from those growing out of the sides of ditches.

Senator Joe O’Toole, Seanad Éireann debate, 28 June, 1988

The ash tree’s suitability for hurley-making is so profound that one might wonder if its formation inspired the shape a hurley should take.

Using only its bottom metre and a half or so, hurley-makers traditionally harness the tree’s outstretched roots to lend the hurley its natural turn where the bás emerges. A dense, hardwood tree, ash retains a flexibility – and breakability – that is crucial to the game of hurling. What’s more, the wood’s malleability allows hurley-makers to finely shape it to a hurler’s particular preference.

David Dowling of The Star Hurley in Kilkenny is a third generation hurley-maker. He has come to expect the finicky nature of his clients.

“TJ Reid likes a heavy-ish hurl, but likes it really skinny – down the handle would be very narrow,” he explains to The 42, the six-time All-Ireland winner generally happiest standing alongside Dowling as his hurleys are made, “and he’ll be in here then rubbing the bás making sure it’s flat – he’s very picky.”

A time-consuming process, in such moments the procession of time flattens out. The craftsmanship handed down from one generation to the next has undergone few changes; the hurleys themselves have altered more across the decades than the work that goes into shaping them. Past and present are closely aligned in the everyday of Dowling’s workshop.

It is evidenced even in the ash itself. A little over two decades working in the industry, Dowling has not yet fashioned a hurl from the wood of a tree planted in that time. For the 25, 30 years it takes an Irish or British ash tree to reach the required maturity for hurley-making, he is constantly working with wood which is the product of earlier efforts.

And it is Irish and British ash only that passes through Dowling’s workshop. Across a 30-year period where the majority of hurleys made in Ireland have been created from ash planks imported from continental Europe, The Star Hurley has managed to retain a supply line of more locally sourced ash to keep themselves in business. It is an increasingly rare occurrence within the industry.

Sitting in the office above Colm Foley’s workshop in the Dublin-based 65 Hurls, he tries explaining to The 42 how familiar he has become with the ash available from European forests. “I could pick up a hurl and tell you where it’s from,” he says, not with any showiness but a demonstration of his growing familiarity with the variety of weights and colours which constitute each region’s planks, “whether it’s Irish wood, Ukrainian or Croatian, I could tell you.”

Surrounded by the sawdust which finds its way up from below, Foley, in his early 30s, is not like most hurley-makers. He is first-generation. Be it his craftsmanship, his workshop or the contacts a hurley-maker needs for the selling of hurls, he is the first link in a new chain. None of it was inherited.

Perhaps more difficult than setting that foundation is the actual sourcing of ash itself, however. What is available on the island of Ireland has been in short supply for decades. The ash trees here that have been destroyed by ash dieback were generally planted in response to what had already been a notably sparse forest covering. Since the early 1990s, hurley-makers have been looking abroad in earnest for alternative sources. That search has continued ever more eastwardly.

There is no central database or list of ash suppliers available to tap into, so the feasibility of making hurleys for a living owes much to the doggedness of one’s ability to locate suitable ash. “I’m constantly worried about supply,” says Foley, a full decade on from when he started 65 Hurls. “I do be in bed at night lying awake thinking about it.”

A tree that is so perfectly suited to the particularities of a hurley is dying. Be it in Ireland or sites across Europe from France to Ukraine, no clear plan for its survival is in place.

Michael Smith, the Minister of State at the Department of Energy, was bringing his Forestry Bill before the Seanad toward the end of June 1988.

With a forest covering second lowest only to Iceland in Europe, he was leading the Irish government’s attempts at resurrecting some small portion of Ireland’s forests. Offering grants and generous terms to private landowners on the one hand, the Bill would also bring into being a state-owned commercial forestry company, Coillte Teoranta.

“This new enterprise is designed to meet the challenges of the future,” Minister Smith told the Dáil a few weeks earlier, “and to capitalise on the investment made by successive Governments since the establishment of the State.” Tasked with taking care of Ireland’s woodlands, for all the rhetoric surrounding it, Coillte was there to make money.

“You know with the Great Famine of the 1840s in Ireland,” says Power, “that was caused by a disease, phytophthora infestans, and it spread the exact same way as ash dieback has spread here in Ireland – on the wind.

“Anything that spreads on the wind you can’t control, and that’s it.”

And yet, ash dieback didn’t enter Ireland on the wind.

At the forestry site in Co Leitrim where the disease was first identified in October 2012, its trees had been contaminated upon importation from Europe three years earlier. By no means the only site across Ireland where ash dieback was inadvertently introduced, the life cycle of this disease kick-started when the infected leaves first fell to the forest floor.

Blackened by the fungus, the organism is protected from the winter conditions before reproduction gets underway in warmer months. The changing temperature brings forth tiny fruiting bodies bearing some resemblance to small mushrooms, and in time they release huge quantities of airborne spores that are analogous to the spread of pollen. Landing on the leaves of both healthy and already infected ash trees, it creates conditions whereby the cycle can begin all over again.

Once the fungus has infiltrated the leaves, the ash tree’s demise can be deceptive but brutal.

Dieback, or die back, isn’t ash-specific. It has been attached to this disease for the appropriate manner in which the spores, working their way from the outside in, damage the tree’s vascular tissues. Deprived of its necessary nutrients and water, it’s branches cannot be sustained and will, as the name implies, die back. And the disease travels deeper still. Between the growers, harvesters and suppliers of ash who increasingly walk through infected areas looking for the odd outlier tree that has escaped contamination, sure-fire signs of infection can be found on the bark. Dark lesions, almost diamond-shaped, are common. As are the abnormal growth of bundled sprouts breaking out from the trunk.

For those to whom these trees are a way of life, the disease-ridden demise of this ash is a cruel process in which they feel no more in control than the trees themselves.

Recently I announced a review of the national response to the ash dieback disease. This includes a review of the reconstitution ash dieback scheme and the all-Ireland chalara control strategy 2013. The review comes after a high-level stakeholder meeting in Dublin in which we received the most up-to-date scientific information on the prevalence of the disease in ash plantations in Ireland. I believe it is time for a new approach in Ireland to ash dieback. It is clear from the latest scientific advice that eradication here is no longer considered feasible.

Minister Andrew Doyle, Seanad Éireann debate, 25 June, 2018

It took about five-and-a-half years from the first confirmed case of ash dieback in the Republic of Ireland for Ger Buckley to locate the disease among his ash trees.

Before then Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture Andrew Doyle confirmed that the initial hope of containing and eradicating ash dieback had proven fruitless, Buckley’s sorry discovery of the disease in March 2018 commenced a frustrating back-and-forth with government officials that remains ongoing.

“I’ve written to the Department 100 times, all to no avail,” he says, aware that such a number may sound excessive, “but they don’t even acknowledge in some cases that you’ve written to them.”

Of the various schemes and solutions put forth to ease the significant financial losses being felt by growers like Buckley, the State has never appeared to have taken the correct action at the right time. When he came face-to-face with the Minister of State for the Department of Agriculture Pippa Hackett at an event in Youghal two years ago, Buckley attempted to lay out clearly why one program launched in June 2020, the Reconstitution and Underplanting Scheme (RUS), was unfit for purpose.

One key objective of the RUS was to support landowners in their attempts to remove affected ash crops and replace them with alternative species. Despite being burned before by the initial reconstitution scheme, Buckley didn’t see much alternative but to engage with this latest initiative.

Having received licencing approval (in itself an astonishingly slow-moving process that has been known to drag out over years) to remove infected ash trees from one of his sites and replace it with an alternative species of tree, Buckley received just over €5,000 in government funding.

“But it cost me around €15,000,” he says, factoring in the various associated costs as he came before Minister Hackett.

“I said, ‘Minister, look, the scheme that you have is not compatible with the actual cost. You have to do something about this because nobody will plant a tree anywhere and you’ll destroy the entire forestry program if you don’t solve this.’

“I showed her invoices and she said to one of her aides to take note of it and blah, blah, blah – not a fucking word has come out of it since.”

One of an estimated 6,000 Irish ash growers impacted by ash dieback, Buckley’s frustrated experience with the State is not unique. Although a different government in a different time sold him and others on the long-term safety of investing in tree plantations, those individuals who signed up in good faith have been left out of pocket and dismayed.

In September 2023, an independent report commissioned by Minister Hackett to assess the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s “approach and supports for landowners affected by ash dieback since 2013” was published. It was damning in its conclusions.

“From 2018 onwards the response of the State was flawed and ineffective and clearly did not meet the needs of forest owners,” it reads, “or society as a whole.”

Of the flawed Reconstitution and Underplanting Scheme that Ger Buckley stood before Minister Hackett and criticised in 2021, the independent report was equally damning. In this instance, the report is worth quoting at length:

The eventual introduction of the new RUS in 2020 was roundly criticised. The scheme itself has changed a number of times, and the €1000/ha rate for clearance was described as ‘derisory’ – especially for older sites. The number of reactive changes to the scheme, coupled with poor communication (exacerbated by the Covid pandemic), the technical flaws and the leadership failure by the State led to minimal uptake and further negativity of farmers towards forestry and the DAFM forestry service. While the increased clearance rates are acceptable to many of those we met with, there are categories of site that would involve higher costs, notably smaller dispersed sites, sites with need for access improvement and sites with significant public road frontage, where the health & safety risks are higher. In our view the changes to the scheme do not go far enough to address the issue, given the disproportionate impact of the ash plantations on confidence in forestry and the delivery of the forestry strategy and climate change targets.

Confirming what some already knew, the independent report called for the ash dieback disease to be regarded as “a national emergency requiring a national and State-led coordinated response”.

“If the Department had addressed this disease, maybe we might have been able to come to some solution,” he reasons, “but they didn’t, and it’s become rampant.”

Approaching the 65 Hurls workshop on the 40D Dublin Bus route, you pass beneath an overhanging tree by the side of the road.

“It’s an ash tree, yeah,” confirms Colm Foley, the irony of this small sampling of Ireland’s suitability for ash growth while he imports material from Eastern Europe not lost on him.

As a steady flow of people pass in and out of the shop downstairs on a bitterly cold morning, Foley, a young outlier in the hurley-making industry, admits to some confusion about the GAA’s response to the ash dieback problem.

“I’d love to see some communication from the GAA,” he says, Foley having entered the business after the first case of ash dieback had been confirmed in 2012. “It could only be a good thing and if we work together it would be so much better at the end of the day.”

The GAA have not been oblivious to the impact of ash dieback on hurley-makers, but their response has been conducted quietly. With the GAA Ash Tree Society, a group featuring representatives from Coillte, Teagasc, the Irish Guild of Ash Hurley Makers and a GAA chair, there has been a consistent effort made over the course of a decade to find alternative solutions to the problems caused by ash dieback.

Although Irish and an ash hurley maker, Foley is not a member of the Guild. Established in 1998, it has between 20-25 members and upholds a focus on smaller hurley-makers generally. While the GAA insisted to The 42 that hurley-makers not involved with the Guild can get in contact of their own volition, it is through the Guild alone that the GAA limits its proactive dealings with hurley-makers.

What could be perceived as a potential advantage to Guild members in the all-important search for suitable ash, all of this might amount to rearranging seats on a sinking ship, however. Within 10 or 15 years, the supply of suitable hurley ash in Ireland, the UK or continental Europe will have dried up significantly.

It is true that each hurley-maker which spoke to The 42 stated that sourcing ash planks has never been easier than in the last year. Yet this unusual abundance is tied to the determination of growers to harvest what healthy trees they have available while the threat of further infection looms. Crucially, while ash dieback has tainted and killed countless trees already, its lasting impact can be measured in the emergence of a European-wide reluctance to plant any more ash trees for the decades ahead.

Ash might one day be resurrected by one means of a resistant gene or another, and perhaps other strains of similarly accessible wood may be rendered suitable for the creation of hurleys. Yet, with an estimated total of 300,000-400,000 hurleys made annually for the Irish market as things stand, there is no surefire solution to ash’s demise ready when that stock does dry up.

Torpey Hurleys in Clare are by no means new to the business of hurley-making, but they are most certainly open to the possibilities of new thinking.

“My father has always been a big believer that because something was always done one way, it doesn’t have to always be done that way,” Sean Torpey says.

The kind of man who planted 20,000 ash trees so his hurley-making business might become truly self-sufficient (alas, ash dieback), John Torpey’s willingness to try new things has been passed along to his son.

A graduate of the renowned University of Loughborough in England’s East Midlands, the younger Torpey has spearheaded the development of a bamboo hurley; or bambú as the range of hurleys is named. Used by the likes of Limerick’s Sean Finn, Gearoid Hegarty and Clare’s John Conlon, it is, evidently enough, not fashioned from ash planks.

Acquiring the material from bamboo sellers in Asia, the bambú deviates from a traditional hurley in terms of the material used and the manner in which it is assembled. Comprised of roughly 150 to 200 singular pieces that are fused together, the resulting hurley is principally shaped and constructed by machinery.

“The challenge was to create something as good as ash, or create something that’s better,” he says, explaining that he retains a fondness for ash while ultimately conceding that it cannot be relied upon long-term from the business’s point of view. “We have taken a problem and not only matched it but probably enhanced it.”

Yet, as the construction process hints at, the feasibility of hurley-makers transitioning from ash to bamboo is not a straight-forward process. What’s more, the Torpeys possess a patent on this idea that makes it their exclusive endeavour for the time being.

When questioned whether the GAA have any concerns that the Torpey’s ingenuity, combined with the inevitable decline of ash, might cultivate a significantly unbalanced hurley-making industry in the years ahead a representative stated to The 42: “The GAA has been proactive in this space and is happy – based on the cutting edge research which is being conducted in conjunction with Dublin City University (DCU) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) – that this will continue to be the case.”

The mistakes which were made in the State’s handling of ash dieback disease are deeply regrettable. In a more careful world, the importation of infected ash would not have taken place and Ireland may have escaped the widespread destruction that followed. This outcome would have required a remarkable stroke of luck, however, and what we must judge successive governments on are the actions that were taken once the disease arrived.

Speaking to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine in early October 2023, Minister Pippa Hackett acknowledged the critical findings of the independent report she commissioned and revealed that she will publish a full implementation plan in due course.

For the time being, she added, “I would encourage affected landowners to apply for the newly launched reconstitution scheme.” If the 6,000 or so she was speaking to might have justifiable pause for thought on that matter, Minister Hackett had a different message for those farmers and landowners who have thus far opted out of getting involved in Irish forestry.

“Print advertisements have been placed in newspapers and you may have heard some of our radio ads,” she informed those gathered of the government’s latest initiative, “advising that ‘it pays to plant a forest.’”

A new Minister. The same message. A different outcome?

For the majority of hurley-makers, what will come next is uncertain. Whether David Dowling and The Star Hurley will pass down three generations of craftsmanship to the next family member, whether Colm Foley’s remarkable doggedness will still be paying off in another 10 years, or whether the Torpeys will revolutionise the game entirely and render ash hurleys a curiosity – nobody can confidently predict what will happen.

And for the ash growers, those “pioneers in their own right” as the government’s independent study described them for buying into the State’s assurances that tree plantations were a safe bet, their lot is equally unclear. Where trees were once sold as the key to an easier life, you would struggle to find a single one of them now who hasn’t been impacted by the frustration and hardship of the last few years.

*****

As Ger Buckley walks his site, it is with a sense of relief that he looks to the harvester working away in the background. What storm damage had allowed him to do by way of clearing potentially dangerous trees overnight, Buckley would need to jump through all manner of legislative hoops to arrange for similar treatment of his diseased ash trees.

Site inspections, a licence to fell trees, the financial burden of both before eventually contracting a harvester to conduct the work – his faith in what had once seemed a sensible, prudent and environmentally beneficial plan has been shattered.

And maybe if it was just about the money he had lost, his anger and frustration at what has happened and how it has been handled would be more easily reckoned with in his mind. When it comes to ash though, there is just something more to it.

For all that this was a part of Ger Buckley’s pension plan, and for the sanctuary he found walking through these new forests as they matured, he always had an idea in mind of the hurleys that would one day come from these ash trees he had planted.

“There is an emotional connection, of course there is,” he says. “For any young child that ever had a hurley in their hand, it’s a shameful thing that we won’t have the means of supporting our national sport.”