The wildlife expert on her new book of Irish biodiversity, staying hopeful, and why dandelions are better than daffodils
Éanna Ní Lamhna: ‘In 1970 we had twice as much biodiversity as we have now. Twice as much: 90 per cent of our curlews are gone’
John Creedon: ‘I was always being sent away, not because they didn’t love me, but because they couldn’t cope’‘The whole adult world is sold as a bright, shiny thing but it’s actually a sad and lonely place’ She recalls older children’s books being “full of inaccuracies ... Spiders were all wrong, for instance. A spider has a head and a body and eight legs. Where are the legs, on its head or its body?” It’s the first of several quizzy questions that throw me. “Little Miss Moffett or Incy Wincy Spider had legs coming out the side of him, and two eyes when he should have eight. They told you squirrels hibernated, and squirrels don’t.
As a child she had a lisp. “No one knew anything I was saying at all. I was a country girl, most of them were townies in class. My father taught me in school, and he was the master.” She tells a funny-awful story involving a lisp, and the elocution teacher forcing her in front of the class to repeat a tongue-twister, warning: ‘Girls, if you don’t do what I tell you, you’ll end up talking like her.’ “The nerve of her,” Ní Lamhna says now, still affronted.
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