We meet at the side of a narrow, winding road, deep in rural Armagh, where a congregation of autumn colours cluster round the tailgate of an old, mud-flecked four-by-four. Men and women are in well-worn wax jackets, and woollen flat-caps crown mostly-grey heads. It’s Cecil’s 80th birthday. Huddled at the roadside, we sing him happy birthday, as a Swiss roll is sliced and served straight into our hands. Down the hill, half-shrouded in the cold mist, the hounds can be heard, anxious to get to work.
Most weekends, these merry few come together to experience hunting. Some are active participants, others remain on the sidelines. As one gentleman tells me, half-joking, half-nostalgic, it’s not an old man’s game to get out in the fields. Yet they’ve all been coming out for years to hear the hounds, and see parts of the country they otherwise wouldn’t know.
At midday, the hounds take off, flanked by men in green hunt coats. At first, I watch from the roadside, but soon we’re all clambering through brambles and over rusty barbed wire in search of the elusive hare. We traipse for hours across muddy sheughs, with the last remaining beagle pack in Northern Ireland. And soon, it could all be gone.
If the rumours are true, a total Northern Irish ban on all forms of hunting with dogs could be proposed this side of Christmas. John Blair, the Alliance Party politician who instigated a public consultation earlier this year, last tried and failed to spearhead a successful prohibition in 2021. For the moment, Northern Ireland remains the only part of the UK in which hunting mammals with dogs remains legal. Hare coursing was made illegal in 2011, but the region generally enjoys fewer restrictions than on the mainland.
Though any proposed ban in Northern Ireland would come as a Private Member’s Bill, it’s intriguing that the anti-hunting lobby is backed by a representative of a party set on “bridging the bitter divisions in our community”. After all, there are few cultural activities in Northern Ireland which enjoy such cross-community, cross-border support as hunting. Indeed, that’s one of the key reasons it’s survived.
The soft border between Northern Ireland and the Republic encourages a fluid culture, with people travelling across the divide for everything from work to grocery shopping. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rural way of life, with Northern Ireland alone hosting 11% of the United Kingdom’s entire agricultural workforce. People travel all across the island to purchase new farming machinery, for instance, or else attend agricultural shows and livestock auctions. They get to know each other, and form relationships without being held back by politics.
The same is true of hunting, with enthusiasts frequently visiting packs in other parts of the island, spending a day or a weekend on an outdoor staycation. And why not? Legislation north and south of the border enjoys many similarities, with both still permitting hunting with dogs. It perhaps helps, too, that liberalisation of the sort to transform the Anglosphere over recent years is proceeding much more slowly in Northern Ireland.
Then there’s the question of class. In England, likely to soon be hit by its own proposal for a ban on trail hunting (the hunting of scents laid by humans, rather than the genuine article laid by animals), the practice has long been stalked by accusations of snobbery. “The hunting ban in England and Wales was passed because, in the words of Labour MPs, it was ‘class war’,” says Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance.
Yet in Ireland, both north and south, the same divisions don’t really apply. Northern Ireland, especially, doesn’t have the kind of regional upper crust you might find in Lincolnshire or Devon. That’s largely because aristocrats have historically been reluctant to settle here, with smallholdings still the general rule. As for the south, the old Anglo-Irish elite has long since departed, with the IRA systematically burning around 275 “big houses” between 1919 and 1923.
This relative egalitarianism means hunting here is a far cry from cliches common across the Irish Sea. “The vast majority of hunting in NI is done on foot and generally [is] the centre of local rural communities,” says Owen Mulcahy, secretary of the Irish Working Terrier Federation, confirming what I experienced during my afternoon in Armagh.
“This relative egalitarianism means hunting here is a far cry from cliches common across the Irish Sea.”
Not that hunting’s opponents care much about that, with many dismissing it as vicious. Typical here are the comments of Emma Reynolds, the current environment secretary in Westminster, who has said that hunting with dogs is “not humane and cannot be justified”. The truth, though, is that hounds spend most of their time out hunting puzzling out the scent. The dogs only chase the mammal — whether fox, rabbit or hare — once they see it. And, even then, a chase will rarely last more than a couple of minutes. These animals are fast, intelligent, and wily; they can, and regularly do, escape the dogs.
Besides, the time from catch to kill is seconds, and the escape of wounded prey is unheard of. As Roger Scruton observed in 1998, other less controversial methods of pest control, like shooting and trapping, “offer a fate far worse than the instant death that is administered by a pack of hounds”.
At any rate, it seems that class politics is now coming to Ireland, both north and south. Consider the fate of hare coursing; though banned in Northern Ireland, it’s still legal in the Republic. Tellingly, meanwhile, Sinn Féin, long the party of Left-leaning Irish nationalists, voted against banning “traditional rural occupations such as hunting and hare coursing” at its all-Ireland party conference in 2023.
In this regard, then, Sinn Féin arguably represents the island’s rural voice, which politicians like Blair seem hellbent on ignoring. Just like his latest efforts, the Alliance member promoted a public consultation ahead of the 2021 hunting ban bill. According to the resulting survey, commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports, there was “strong support from the farming community to ban hunting with dogs”. Yet the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU), the largest democratic voluntary organisation representing farmers and growers in Northern Ireland, wrote an open letter to the Northern Ireland Assembly lamenting that neither Blair nor his team had engaged with them.
Last month, meanwhile, the UFU unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the Alliance-led Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Belfast, citing “total frustration” with their conduct. Not to be outdone, a coalition of organisations and experts on hunting with dogs, named Northern Ireland Says Enough (NoISE), lately made requests about what risks a potential ban would pose to their lifestyles. Among other issues, they raised questions regarding alternative forms of wildlife management, loss of income, and mental-health detriments associated with a ban on hunting with dogs. According to the coalition, Blair’s responses lacked detail.
I asked Blair about what impact he believes a ban on all forms of hunting would have on community cohesion in Northern Ireland. He reiterates that a ban “has received widespread backing” from across the community. “The aim of the legislation is not to undermine cross-community engagement,” he continues, “but rather to encourage activities that unite us without causing harm to animals.” According to Blair, there are plenty of other cross-community opportunities, “from sporting events to the arts” which don’t “involve the killing of animals”.
It perhaps bears mentioning that Blair is a keen fisherman, who argues for further support and development of angling in Northern Ireland. Why the killing of fish is to be championed, and the killing of mammals condemned, remains rather opaque. Is it based on a view that sea life is less able to experience suffering than mammals, or maybe that anglers have worked harder to reduce the suffering of their catches?
Or, perhaps, Blair is simply beholden to the culture war, and abhors hunting without the need to rely on evidence? Whatever the truth, and with a new ban looming, Northern Ireland’s hunters are worried about what comes next — not just to their hobby but to their wallets too. Mulcahy tells me the alternative usually proposed to hunting is trapping. But, echoing Scruton, each trap costs roughly £350 each, and that’s before you factor in the suffering faced by animals who then need to be gassed or shot. “It’s all emotional misconception,” Mulcahy adds. “Ireland’s wildlife [is] caught up in a game between the ignorant delusional armchair naturalists and practising hard-working farmers and hunting practitioners with experience of humane and balanced control measures.”
