Setting the Land Free

Supported by Science Week.

Award-winning author and rewilder Eoghan Daltun has become one of Ireland’s leading voices on environmental issues. He joins Mary Robinson, a globally recognised voice on the climate crisis, to discuss his latest book, Setting the Land Free: Visions of a Rewilded Ireland (Hachette Ireland). With the rewilding movement in Ireland gathering stature and impact, Eoghan took to the high roads and by-roads to meet with those at the forefront of change, from those involved in bog ecosystem restoration, to native species reintroduction, to rewilding at sea, forest rewilding, and much more.

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Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator, a farmer, an author and, above all, a rewilder. Reared in Dublin, he has travelled widely, as well as living abroad in London, Paris and Prague. He spent seven years studying sculpture in Carrara, Tuscany. In 2009, he sold the cottage in Kilmainham he had rebuilt mostly single-handed from a ruin – dating back to at least the 1750s – using the original stone. The proceeds went to buy a long-abandoned 73-acre farm overlooking the Atlantic near Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork. Much of the land was covered in wild native forest which, although very beautiful, was ecologically wrecked by severe overgrazing and invasion by a host of alien plant species. Over the years since, Eoghan has brought life in all its explosive vibrancy back to the land, with new temperate rainforest spontaneously forming where previously there was only barren grass. Restoring such an incredibly rich ecosystem has taken him on a fantastic voyage of discovery, which he charted in his memoir An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding, which won an An Post Irish Book Award in 2022. Rewilding most of the land, and High Nature Value farming the rest, has given him plenty of time to reflect deeply on the ecological crisis unfolding at terrifying speed all around us, and its solutions. Eoghan followed this up in 2024 with a stunning full-colour illustrated book, The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey, in which he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland photographing areas of temperate rainforest, in a bid to illustrate their beauty and immense ecological value, and to document, in almost all cases, their state of decline. Eoghan lives on the farm with his two sons, Liam and Seánie, their collie dog, Charlie, and five Dexter cows: Maggie, Gertrude, Amber, Nelly and Minnie. Setting the Land Free: Visions of a Rewilded Ireland is his third book.

Mary Robinson is a co-founder of Project Dandelion, which is a women-led global campaign for climate justice, Adjunct Professor for Climate Justice at Trinity College Dublin, and a member of The Elders. She served as President of Ireland from 1990-1997 and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002. She is a member of the Club of Madrid and the recipient of numerous honours and awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States Barack Obama. Between 2013 and 2016, Mary served as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy in three roles; first for the Great Lakes region of Africa, then on Climate Change leading up to the Paris Agreement and in 2016 as his Special Envoy on El Niño and Climate. Her Foundation, the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, established in 2010, came to a planned end in April 2019.

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