A group of Catholic parishes are creating a little bit of heaven on earth by rewilding their church grounds.
The 10 parishes in Co Clare are the first to respond in an organised way to the Irish bishops’ commitment to give 30pc of church lands back to nature by 2030.
Now, instead of manicured lawns, precision-pruned hedges and uniform shrubbery, 12 churches have healthy stretches of meadow with displays of wildflowers that are a lifeline to bees and other pollinators.
Some churches also have boxes for barn owls and swifts, while some have installed bat roosts in secluded spots.
The “30 by 30” pledge followed Pope Francis’s backing of the agreement reached at the UN biodiversity summit in 2022 to reverse the decline of the nature by the end of the decade.
Clergy welcomed the move but were not sure how to go about implementing it until Clare County Council biodiversity officer Barry O’Loughlin stepped in.
“I heard about it and thought, there’s an opportunity there, not just to help the churches but to give biodiversity visibility,” he said.
“The church is the focal point in a lot of towns and I thought if people can see what it means to allow nature back into somewhere like that, it will get attention.”
Fr Tony Casey, of Cooraclare, was one of the first parish priests to volunteer and he is delighted with the result.
“I love it. It brings great life and colour. But all I’m doing is allowing it to happen. The community are making it happen,” he said.
Tidy Towns is among the groups most directly involved and Ger Kelly, of the Cooraclare branch, said it has been a learning, or rather unlearning, process.
“I always thought that wildflowers had to be sown from seed and we spent a few years trying that around the town without any great results. The thinking now is to just them develop themselves and that’s worked fine,” he said.
“We still need to manage the plots or else invasive plants will take over but we leave them alone as much as possible until September when they’re cut.”
Bigger jobs include removing and replacing laurel and leylandii hedging which have been carefully tended for years but have nothing to offer birds or insects. “If only we’d known,” said Fr Casey. “A lot of mistakes were made in the past.”
Funding for the Return to Nature Church Biodiversity Project comes from the National Parks and Wildlife Service and Clare County Council, and has cost about €15,000.
Mr O’Loughlin said his ambition was to see it rolled out to all 1,300-plus parishes in the country.
“This was initially a six-week project but when the communities saw orchids coming up and ox-eye daisies and hawksbeard and all the colour, they wanted to keep going,” he said.
“There’s an obsession with the neat-and-tidy concept in green spaces, so you have to break down that barrier, but we did and it’s giving biodiversity a chance.”