Residents and campaigners say fast-growing Sitka spruces are spoiling the landscape

Ireland is ramping up its response to the climate crisis by planting forests – lots of forests. East, west, north, south, the plan is to plant forests, the more the better.

With enough trees, goes the hope, Ireland can compensate for many of the cows, vehicles and fossil-burning power plants that make it one of Europe’s worst climate offenders.

From having just 1% forest cover in 1900, Ireland now has 11%, covering 770,000 hectares. It has just committed to planting 8,000 more hectares each year to reach 18% coverage.

Research published last week said planting billions of trees across the world was the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis.

But some in Ireland have a problem with the great green vision. They say Ireland is planting the wrong sort of forests – dark, dank abominations that kill wildlife, block sunlight and isolate communities.

“It’s like a wall around you, dead, darkness. It’s suffocating. We’re losing the landscape,” said Edwina Guckian, a member of Save Leitrim, a group that is resisting plantations.

“You couldn’t live in the middle of this thing unless you were Grizzly Adams,” said Jim McCaffrey, another member, crouching in a gloomy, tangled copse. “It’s absolute misfortune when you see the plantations coming.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s like a wall around you’, says Edwina Guckian of the spruce plantations in county Leitrim. Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian

The group, named after county Leitrim in Ireland’s north-west, has delayed some plantations with a blitz of planning objections and hopes to galvanise resistance in other counties. Last month a protester used a digger to block workers from felling trees and planting new ones.

The offending species is Sitka spruce, a coniferous evergreen that dominates Ireland’s afforestation programme. Originally from North America, it grows quickly and tall – up to 100 metres – and flourishes in Ireland’s damp, temperate climate.

About half of Ireland’s trees are Sitka spruces, many in packed phalanxes that blanket hills and valleys. They supply wood for pulp, plywood, pallets, fencing, garden furniture and building materials, much of it exported to Britain. And they absorb carbon, an increasingly valuable function as Ireland tries to avert fines of hundreds of millions of euros for missing targets on emissions and renewable energy.

The government recently unveiled a plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions and set a path for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. With emissions from agriculture set to rise, not fall, success hinges partly on planting 8,000 hectares of new forest each year, auguring a lot more Sitka spruces.

Save Leitrim activists say their county has been a laboratory for such plantations – “a national sacrifice zone” – and that the results are a warning to the rest of the country.

“We’re not anti-trees, we’re anti-this,” said Willie Stewart, tramping through a gloomy pine-filled grove near his home in the townland of Drumnadober. “It’s industrial monoculture – a green barrier all around us. It’s horrible.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Save Leitrim members Jim McCaffrey, Willie Stewart, Natalia Beylis, Edwina Guckian and baby Paudi, Brian Smyth. Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian

The activists, who include artists, farmers and business owners, say plantations inflict ecological and social damage and capture less carbon than proponents claim.

The companies behind the plantations reject this and say Sitka forests play vital economic and environmental roles.

Leitrim is bucolic and sparsely populated – just 32,000 people. Sitka thrives in the waterlogged soil with high clay content.

Coillte, a state-owned commercial forestry business, started buying land and planting here in the 1960s. Private companies, encouraged by tax breaks, followed. Farm land vanished as Sitkas multiplied. They now number an estimated 34.5m – more than 1,000 for each inhabitant.

The trees mature in about 30 years – exponentially faster than oak – and are then felled, making way for a fresh plantation.

“The forest closed in bit by bit,” said McCaffrey, a farmer, who now feels surrounded. The trees eclipse sunlight, exude mist and block wifi and phone networks, inducing isolation, he said. “It’s a death sentence for the townlands.”

These non-native trees carpet the soil with acidic needles and smother wildlife, said Natalia Beylis, an artist. “A lot of people find them spooky because they don’t have life in them. They’re silent except on the edges.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sitka spruce needles. Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian

When machines chop down swathes of forest, a controversial process known as clear-felling, the landscape is devastated, said Stewart. “It looks like Hiroshima.”

Brian Smyth, another member of Save Leitrim who runs a rural development non-profit, questioned the plantations’ climate credentials, saying carbon-soaking bogs were damaged and diesel-emitting machines often felled trees prematurely. “It’s all about money,” he said.

Campaigners filed multiple planning objections to delay fellings and fresh plantations, said Smyth. “It clogs the system. We’ve stalled their work.”

Forestry companies concede some plantations were too thick and sited too close to homes but that the system is now improved, affording greater space and biodiversity, with at least 15% of trees that are not Sitka spruce.

What is biodiversity and why does it matter to us? Read more

“We’re in a different age now, we do things differently,” said Paul Jordan, a Leitrim-based manager for Coillte, the state-owned company. He cited sparrow hawk nests and badgers as evidence that Sitka forests foster wildlife. “It’s not the dead zone that the protestors would claim it is.”

John O’Reilly, the CEO of Green Belt, Ireland’s biggest private forestry company, said Sitka grew three times faster in Ireland than Scandinavia, driving a sustainable sector that generated jobs, created essential building materials and benefited the environment. “The faster it grows, the greater the quantity of carbon it will sequester from the atmosphere.”

The government’s target of 8,000 new hectares per year does not identify species but Sitka’s dominance is expected to gradually wane.

Last week Coillte announced it would convert nine commercial timber forests in the Dublin mountains to primarily recreational and biodiversity use to create different type of forest that people could enjoy from a “landscape and aesthetic point of view”.