Ireland has a unique relationship to climate change. The country has always relied on its pastoral landscapes for its national character, but the escalating climate crisis threatens this tradition because of rising temperatures and sea levels, and deforestation. Given Irish literature’s continued interest in nature, contemporary Irish poets are tackling these issues in their writing.
Poetry plays a special role in times of mass environmental decline. As a literary genre that relies on flexible, open-ended and even conflicting language to address complicated issues, poetry is especially well-suited to address the complex entanglement of local and global concerns, human and nonhuman lives, that gain increased prominence because of climate change.
Poems that explore environmental issues, often called ecopoems, can pack a lot of ideas into a single image. A short poem focused on a seemingly mundane subject can hide a wealth of meaning behind its simplicity.
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Heaney’s bogs
The Nobel prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney knew this. Taking inspiration from ancient Irish nature writing, Heaney described the Irish landscape as “a system of reality beyond the visible realities”.
In his 1969 poem Bogland, he defines the bog itself as representing the essence of Irishness.
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
Heaney juxtaposes Irish bogs with the vast prairies of the American west by presenting them as archives of natural and human history.
Ecopoetry scholar Yvonne Reddick has shown that from the early 1970s, Heaney extensively researched bog formation. His poems demonstrate an awareness of how the bogs have preserved Irish elk skeletons and iron age bodies because of their oxygen-free conditions.
For Heaney, the landscape was more than a lifeless background. It was a literal container of Irish history, including the possibility of environmental catastrophe.
Bogland gained new life when Heaney used it to support the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation in 1991. As part of a fundraising initiative, the poem’s opening stanzas were printed on a poster beneath a painting by T.P. Flanagan. It was accompanied by the following information: “Peatlands are under serious threat because of cutting, drainage, afforestation and erosion … We have a responsibility to conserve and restore what remains.”
Turf-cutting (harvesting peat from bogs to use as fuel for home heating and cooking) was an important part of Heaney’s upbringing. But his involvement with conservation causes points to a changed outlook on these practices because of their environmental impact.
Finding the past in the present
Contemporary Irish poets continue this legacy. With a PhD in ornithology, writer Mary Montague relays her concern for environmental issues with poetic passion. Her work is often focused on native Irish animals, many of which are facing a similar fate to the Irish wolf due to habitat loss and the influence of invasive species.
Wolves were once common in Ireland. Research estimates that roughly 800 to 1,000 wolves roamed the country around the year 1600. Because wolves thrived in Ireland after their extinction in England, colonial authorities felt justified in using this as evidence of Irish “savagery”. Bounties were eventually established that spelled out the necessity of exterminating these creatures, the last of which was killed in 1786.
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Montague connects this violent history to the threats currently facing Irish animals. Her poem Haunted draws on the mythic connotations of ravens – which were once connected to the Celtic goddess of death, Mórrígan – to mourn the loss of Irish wolves. The poem asks whether the birds’ ominous associations ironically signal their own impending demise, given the escalating effects of climate change.
Their ragged capes of wingspans still float
over the Sperrins to scan the landscape
for the blot of a carcase, but they reel
with a fatalism, black flags
suspended over an absence.
Poet Cherry Smyth also links Ireland’s colonial past to the current ecological moment. Her collection Famished (2019) found echoes of the great Irish famine in the rise of climate refugees.
More recently, her collection One Mountain: Sold (2025) responds to the threat of gold mining in the Sperrin Mountains, County Tyrone. The collection can be read as a poetic companion to the Save Our Sperrins campaign. This grassroots movement opposes the extraction of gold, silver and other minerals from the Sperrins and surrounding landscape.
Montague explained some of the campaign’s main concerns in the Guardian’s County Diary column. These include the pollution of air and water, the dehydration of local bog land and the potential risks to human health caused by mining.
Together, these poets show how the strongest of Irish ecopoems connect colonial history to the climate crisis. They highlight how the effects of environmental degradation in Ireland are the latest influence on an already precarious relationship to land.
Jane Clarke’s work also shows a dedication to healing these histories of violence embedded in Irish landscapes. Speaking at the Dublin City University Centre for Climate and Society in 2024, Clarke emphasised the importance of the arts in promoting environmentalism.
Clarke’s recent collaboration with the Burrenbeo Trust, a nonprofit organisation that runs various conservation campaigns across Ireland, demonstrates this commitment. The Hare’s Corner (2025) features original poems by Clarke that reflect the benefits of projects run by Burrenbeo that promote healthier farming practices that give threatened species the chance to flourish.
While governmental intervention based on scientific fact remains the most effective solution to climate change, contemporary Irish poets show the importance of literature in fighting environmental decline. As Montague writes in her contribution to The Watchful Heart anthology: “Loss is inevitable; the formalised language of poetry may help us endure it.”
Jack Reid does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.