Welcome to the post-natural landscape of 'Wild Nephin'/Ballycroy National Park in Co. Mayo. It offered so much promise, where did it all go wrong?

Launched in 2013 by taoiseach Enda Kenny it offered a "15 year restoration period during which the plantation forest will be remodelled with native pine & deciduous trees, drainage channels blocked, invasive rhododendron cleared & infrastructure removed...
https://www.wildeurope.org/wild-nephin-forestry-restoration/

...leaving the landscape governed entirely by natural processes. There are plans to reintroduce species such as golden plover, merlin and red squirrel, real possibilities of attracting white-tailed sea eagle... and perhaps osprey".

None of these things have happened...

Like many I was enthusiastic at the time but cautious due to the lack of specifics. In 2016 we followed up with this piece by @lennyantonelli for @Irishwildlife magazine. He was told a management plan would be produced by summer 2017. That didn't happen. https://iwt.ie/wheres-wild-wild-nephin/

An investigation by @GreenNews_ie
at the end of 2017 found that far from replacing the conifers, 260,000 *new* conifers had been planted since 2013. Some of these can be see in the photo.
https://greennews.ie/ireland-first-wilderness-zone-under-threat-commercial-forestry/

In 2018 the 'Wild Nephin' area (purple) was added to to the Ballycroy National Park (green) so it's now massive. That year also saw the production of a 'Conversion Plan'... which was only released to me under a Freedom of Information request. The plan is not bad...

However, 7 years into the 15 year plan virtually nothing has happened on the ground (though of course the signs went up nearly straight away)...

A trip to the 'non-plantation' parts of the National Park, also a 'special area of conservation' reveals some pretty serious landscape degradation. Nothing being done here either...

Although I'm told things are moving ahead it's all very secretive. There's no website giving information. I have not been able to find any evidence of community/stakeholder outreach ever having been done. The B&B owner I stayed with recently in Newport had never even heard of it.

At what point can we declare the whole thing a sham? The thing is... it could be amazing. It needs serious investment to get things moving & a change in culture. It needs local community buy-in but it could be transformative for local employment never mind the wildlife potential

But as usual everyone walks away once the marketing brochures have been printed. What will it take for 'Wild Nephin' to start living up to the hype?