Top Offaly tourist attraction wins prestigious environmental award

BIRR Castle Estate has been awarded a prestigious EU environmental prize for its hard work to improve its bee population.

The Special Mention of the Jury was awarded by the relevant EU body to the “Birr Castle Bee Project”, an excellent ongoing project which is being run by the Estate. The estate implemented changes in the land and forest management across its land in order to create, protect, and enhance bee habitat wherever possible.

Dr. Michael Garratt, from the University of Reading, President of the European Bee Award Jury which includes also international experts, members of the European Institutions and NGOs, said the entries to the European Bee Award reveal “a real variety of positive actions and activities to support bees and pollinators across Europe. We thank participants for their commitment and enthusiasm”.

The European Bee Award has been acknowledging innovative, efficient, and scalable projects that protect pollinators in Europe since it was established in 2014 by the European Landowners’ Organization (ELO) and the European Agricultural Machinery Industry Association (CEMA).

Alicia Clements from Birr Castle Estate attended the Bee Awards in the EU Parliament. “All of us on the Birr Castle Estate are immensely grateful for this recognition today,” she said. “It is good to know we are on the right path, of what we regard as step 1 of a continuous journey. We have always recognised the importance of our natural heritage, but it is in the past 10 years that we have really focused on its long term care & protection as its survival became more critical.”

Alicia pointed out that key to protection was firstly finding out what they had, so in 2016 they commissioned a study of all the natural heritage on the estate. The study took over 9 months, during which all the flora and fauna, every bug, beetle, fungi, lichen and mollusc as well as all the mammals and birds were identified and listed.

The study revealed that the estate had an impressive eight different habitats, including bogland, woodland and callows (the estate goes beyond the walls of the Castle Demesne, being about twenty times the size of the Demesne). The study identified target species for habitat management, and top of that list was Invertebrates - Bees and Butterflies; as none of the other target species of Bats, Birds, & Mammals would survive if the Estate didn’t make sure that these invertebrates thrived.

“So in 2019,” continued Alicia, “Sean McGuinness (of Eco Plan) and I sat down and came up with the Bee Habitat Project to make sure that in each of our habitats we were doing everything we could to support the pollinators. The habitat project has worked very well since it was implemented and we are delighted to see the positive fruits of our work.”