New Year resolution needed

Dear Editor, Amid all the restrictions and health concerns that blighted our lives in recent weeks, there was no let-up in the assault on our iconic Irish hare, an animal hailed by conservationists as the flagship of Ireland’s biodiversity.

The gentle hare won no respite from its tormenters, for whom Covid proved no impediment to harassing or killing these timid creatures.

Across the nation, hares ran from pairs of hyped-up greyhounds over Christmas. Though the Irish hare is an ostensibly protected species; a special exemption in wildlife legislation permits specified clubs to capture them for use as live bait in coursing.

In other words, the law protects the hare from just about everyone but those who wish to subject it to weeks of unnatural captivity and a stressful contrived chase in a wired enclosure.

And each hare has to run not once but two or three times per fixture. Most coursing events now run for two or three days, meaning that the same hares must be coursed each day, each chase increasing the chances of their being mauled or having their bones crushed by the dogs.

It’s a kind of Russian roulette, but only the hares must bear the risk of death or severe injury: the fans can laugh and cheer and mark their betting cards in safety as the animals perform for them.

A Dail Private Members Bill later this year will afford TDs the opportunity to close down the cruel hare coursing industry for good. But have they the courage to break the vice-like grip in which the blood sports lobby has held them for decades?

Let’s hope so. The Irish hare is revered in song, literature and folklore. It is part of our wildlife heritage that belongs to all of us:

It should not be the preserve of an unrepresentative minority, or at the butt-end of this joke that calls itself ‘a sport’.

Thanking you, John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street,

Callan, Co. Kilkenny.