Green Sod Summer School 2025: “Sustainability is about community” | News | Notre Dame Kylemore

A group of people observe as a woman in a red jacket uses a shovel for a groundbreaking ceremony, with a green mountain in the background.

This August, Notre Dame Kylemore hosted the Green Sod Summer Environmental School, a weekend of lectures, outreach, community involvement, and connecting with the land. The lectures were recorded by Connemara Radio.

The event engaged nonprofit representatives, researchers spreading awareness for their ongoing projects, local Connemara farmers sharing ecological needs, current research findings, nature-inspired poetry, and a space to discuss environmental initiatives.

Green Sod is a land trust that protects land and its biodiversity. Their vision is ambitious, resting upon three pillars: Land, Education, and Community. They are working to establish Wild Acres (land in protection) in every county in Ireland. Green Sod has also developed several educational programs that span primary schools, training, and adult education.

An overview of Saturday’s events

The rainy morning began with tea and casual conversation in the refectory, where the community members and speakers were able to introduce each other more informally. The first lecture of the program started in the classroom and was led by the Dúlra speakers: Sinéad Grimes, project manager, and Roisin Gannon, project facilitator. They showed visuals of their efforts in Bog Restoration, spanning drain blocking, bank reprofiling, installation of coir logs, laying geotextile on bare peat, and livestock management.

This lecture was followed by a presentation by Wild Atlantic Nature titled “Integrating Nature, People, and Place.” Led by Dr. Margaret Flaherty, community engagement officer, the presentation gave an overview of the poor condition of blanket bogs. Due to nonalignment of policy, farmers have received mixed messages, which “has led to a decline in water quality and biodiversity and an increase in carbon emissions.”

According to Margaret Flaherty, “What Wild Atlantic Nature wants to do is to deliver high-quality habitats sensitive to local contexts that deliver for the environment, farmers, and local communities. Dual benefit is important. A way of doing that is through a results-based agri-environment programme (RBPS). We need to reward high quality, but also incentivise improvement of poor quality.”

Wild Atlantic Nature led a workshop on filling out a Grassland Scorecard, a type of results-based agri-environment program that assesses the ecological integrity of the lands of the farm. The group was given an overview of the different plants that make up blanket bog vegetation and asked to review example landscapes for positive or negative indicators and their cover of that landscape. The higher the score of the land’s positive indicators, the higher the payment the farmer receives. In this scheme, they can receive up to 7,000 euros per year as a results-based payment. The farmer has to have enough land and also score quite high to receive this payment, but it’s a step towards engaging farmers with an incentive to protect their lands.

The last lecture before lunch was a research-focused talk on Gunnera Control, led by Lorraine Hope, project officer at ACRES, where she explained her current research methods on mitigating the expanse of wild rhubarb, also known as Gunnera tinctoria.

According to Hope, “The plant is a highly invasive alien species that has been spreading on Achill Island for over 70 years, invading a range of habitats including water courses, cliffs and agricultural grasslands. It is difficult to control once established in an area and treatment is labour intensive and expensive, needing to be continued over a long period of time.”

An audience sits in chairs facing a presenter and a projected slide titled "Introduction." The presenter, a man in a light brown shirt and dark pants, gestures toward the slide, which lists bullet points including "Location and Layout," "Farming System," "History," and "Challenges." A whiteboard stands near the projection screen.

Control and management span chemical, biological, and manual processes. Hope also shared that ACRES has landscape actions currently available for farmers regarding invasives control, peatland restoration, and wildlife support. Lectures served as community discussions for the people from the surrounding area, including environmentally conscious residents, local farmers, and environmental researchers, with a keen interest in local environmental work.

Post-lunch, Colm Gavin led a more casual discussion on “Farming in the High Nature Value Uplands,” where he covered the challenges of commonages, farming issues due to heavy rainfall, and the general relationships among farmers and how that has evolved over time.

Fiona Brennan, senior research officer in Soil Microbiology at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority, described the company’s integrated research, advisory, and training services to the agriculture and food industry and rural communities. Brennan led a discussion of soil health, specifically the issues around public awareness about soil science, and she emphasized the dire nature of the issue across Ireland: “We have no direct legislation protecting soil at the moment.” The focus of the talk centered on GroundTruth, a Teagasc citizen science project where students, teachers, farmers, and local communities assess the health of the soil in farms, gardens, schools, or parks by doing four easy tests, each of which provide information on a different aspect of soil health. Soil Health Week is September 22-26—visit the Teagasc website for more details.

A person wearing a red jacket and baseball cap bends over a white board, placing a clump of dark soil and grass onto it. They are surrounded by other individuals observing on a grassy area.

Afterwards, GroundTruth led an interactive demonstration wherein the group went to a plot at the front of Notre Dame Kylemore and dug out a square of soil, evaluated its quality (quite sandy, silky), and buried the cotton as a part of the experiment plan for GroundTruth. It was lightly raining, but the group enjoyed the moment to be outside and feel the soil in their hands.

Patrick Fitzmaurice, community engagement officer for Corncrake LIFE, closed out the lectures for the day. He introduced corncrakes, an endangered species of bird colored dark yellow-brown, with dark barring on the back, reddish flanks, and a grey belly. Patrick shared that corncrakes have “suffered a drastic population decline in recent years . . . confined to marginal areas with difficult terrain.” He shared their current numbers in Ireland, and the importance of early and late cover vegetation (nettles and wheatgrass, potatoes and hogweed) for their preservation.

His lecture was followed by Benjamin Theraudeau, who centered his talk on Geohazards in rural western communities, and brought to light the importance of geoparks, and how these sites and landscapes are of international geological significance.

After dinner, over charcuterie and wine, guests perused an exhibition of nature-centered photography, a collection of the work of Richard Crane. The evening closed out with a gathering of literature, art, and biodiversity. Jane Robinson shared poetry centered on nature (rain, earthworms, midges), and read from a collection of books she brought to the reading in a small basket woven by her sister. She noted how her imagination has been moved by the ecology of Ireland.

At twilight, a hand holds a tablet displaying a spectrogram app with green and orange visuals. A dark silhouette of a hill and water are in the background. A small red digital device is visible in the bottom left corner.

The final event of the evening was a Bat Walk, led by Caitriona Carlin at the Gothic Chapel on the Kylemore Abbey grounds. The group was given bat detectors, and the leaders of the talk used a sound-detecting software to determine the frequency to dial the bat detectors to hear their different calls. Participants walked along Polacappul Lake down to the Gothic Chapel to hear the variety of bats and engage with the nature of the area, navigating the sound waves from the brown long-eared bat, common pipistrelle, and soprano pipistrelle.

An Overview of Sunday’s Events

In the morning, Margaret Flaherty expanded upon Wild Atlantic’s specific projects and funding opportunities. A notable example is their work with the Bundorragha Catchment: one of the most important catchment areas for freshwater pearl mussels. Farmers were losing scores in results-based payment networks and needed financial assistance due to the extensive areas of rhododendron, an invasive, non-native species. Wild Atlantic Nature was able to provide funding through NPWS, and they developed a pilot to inform a catchment-wide approach, and the Leenane Development Association partnered with PMP EIP and secured a tender. This project has been extended to two other groups: Atlantic West Natura Community in Mayo and Cairde na hEaragaile in Donegal.

Wild Atlantic Nature offered a Blanket Bog Restoration Toolkit PDF, which provides more information on features of higher/lower scoring fields, identifying if there is action required, providing examples of invasive non-native species, and more. Afterwards, participants gathered in the lobby to investigate mayflies, which were collected from the water at Kylemore.

The final lecture involved Breeding Waters EIP, led by Andrea Parisi, lead project ecologist. The group “aims to secure existing Breeding Wader populations and support population recovery through landscape management and policy development.” Since the 1970s, Ireland’s breeding wader populations have suffered dramatic declines in population size and national breeding range, and they are developing the EIP-Agri project to tackle the multifaceted causes behind this..

Ultimately, the theme of this weekend can be summed up from Wild Atlantic Nature: “As much as [sustainability] is about biodiversity and ecology, it’s also about community and people.”