In four housing estates across north Co Dublin, a Fingal biodiversity officer is proving that nature and new development can coexist, starting with the right blackberries.
On a morning last November in Balbriggan, Ministers and council officials marked the sod-turning of more than 1,160 new homes. Ireland needs homes, nowhere more than in Fingal, where the population is set to rise 25 per cent by 2031 and 16,000 homes are planned by 2029, 90 per cent on open countryside.
The transformation follows a familiar pattern: topsoil stripped, hedgerows replaced with roads, uniform ryegrass lawns rolled out. The ecological bill follows: bats disrupted, hedgehogs isolated, yellowhammers and tree sparrows gone, leaving only foxes, magpies and blackbirds adaptable enough to remain. Hans Visser, Fingal’s biodiversity officer, has spent more than two decades trying to change what comes next.
Visser studied nature and landscape engineering in the Netherlands, where “every square metre has been dug up, so it’s all about restoration”. He moved to Ireland in 2002 to become Fingal’s first biodiversity officer.
RM Block
Ask Visser whether housing and nature can be a genuine win-win, and his answer is candid. “If you go from a greenfield site where you’d have yellowhammer and tree sparrow, and that farmland gets converted into a housing estate, those species are gone. In urban areas there’s money to do things. We don’t see that funding in the countryside.”
He sees opportunity where others see loss. That thinking underpins the Fingal Biodiversity Action Plan, a programme to 2030 with a vision including ospreys returning to the Fingal estuaries for the first time in two centuries, and river shad, once fished from the Liffey, restored through weir removals. Alongside it sits a more immediate offshoot, the Biodiversity Makeover Project, which aims to redesign estates through new planting and changed maintenance. The principle is simple: “If you want birds, you need insects, and if you want insects you need flowers. You can’t just put up a nest box for house sparrows if there is no hedgerow for them to shelter in, no water to drink, no insects for their chicks.”
The estates, chosen from about 30 applications, were Castleway in Malahide, Seatown Villas in Swords, Portersgate in Clonsilla, and St Catherine’s Estate in Rush.
Across the estates, concrete edges and tarmac paths will give way to planted verges, mown grass to flower-rich strips, and culverted watercourses to gentle, meandering streams planted with yellow flag iris and meadowsweet. Beneath mature trees, once sprayed bare, wild garlic and herb-robert will colour the ground instead. Some areas will move from weekly mowing to a three-year cycle, following Dutch research showing longer grass supports beetles, spiders and butterflies. Left uncut, verges can go further. An unmown patch in Malahide has produced native pyramid and bee orchids from the dormant seed bank.
The designs may surprise: they resemble high-end garden design more than ecological restoration. That, says Visser, is the point. “It’s about visuals. People want biodiversity-friendly, but really what they mean is, we want more colour in our estate.”
[ How do you resurrect a graveyard? Simply stop mowing the grassOpens in new window ]
Adrienne O’Hare, a Castleway resident, calls it “structured messiness. You can frame that kind of chaos in the middle, that burst of colour, so that it becomes like a canvas.”
Visser is sceptical of quick fixes. “We get a lot of requests for bee hotels. Don’t bother with that stuff because you need to provide the food first.” Instead, he wants brambles, planted with intent. “We want to collect blackberries from different locations, do a taste test with people to find out which they like best, then take cuttings and plant them in the open space. So you and your kids can actually collect blackberries. It changes the narrative.” Nettles will return too, as food for butterfly caterpillars.
Residents are central to the process: choosing measures, codesigning spaces with landscape architects, and monitoring change with bat detectors and butterfly records shared on WhatsApp groups. “In three days we had everybody in and responding positively,” says O’Hare, who calls it more than habitat: “It’s bringing us back to that sense of community again a bit more.”
Not every proposal landed without hesitation. Bat roosting boxes and wilder-looking planting prompted some unease, but the Fingal team helped. “Because the information was so clear, it alleviated potential concerns and answered a lot of what-ifs,” O’Hare says.
Some changes, particularly woodland edge planting, can take 15-20 years to mature into bird-friendly habitat. Ecologists are taking baseline surveys of birds, bats and insects before work begins, with annual monitoring planned for five years. “Biodiversity funding is limited,” says Visser. “I want to make sure whatever money we have is spent in the most effective way.” If the pilot succeeds, at least 25 other estates have already expressed interest. “We can scale this up once we understand what is actually required.”
For anyone with a garden, Visser’s advice is simple. “Having as many flowers as possible is a good start,” and mow less often: a six-week cycle allows clovers and daisies to return. Nature thrives on mess: fallen leaves, rotting wood and long grass left in place, plus a small pond if possible.
His team is also preparing developer guidance to embed biodiversity from the start rather than retrofit later. For now, the guidance remains advisory. “There’s no national policy that says that,” he acknowledges. “It is not compulsory.”
Until then, the change is happening estate by estate this autumn: flowers planted, streams restored, blackberries selected by taste, and nature given a little more room. Rosie Conama, another Castleway resident, sums it up: “The ultimate measure of success would be that people are out enjoying it.”
