A passion for wolves that explores our deepest fears

Date Published: {J}

From earliest childhood, all of us were taught to fear wolves. If we weren’t being scared to death hearing about the wolf’s sneaky attack on Little Red Riding Hood, we were being told about the epic exploits of the Three Little Pigs to save themselves from the big bad wolf. If it wasn’t advice warning us to beware of the ‘lone wolf’ it was biblical material, telling us to be vigilant for those who were ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’.

A fear of wolves runs deep in our psyche, despite the fact that these magnificent wild animals have been extinct in Ireland since the late 1700s. But, really when you think of it, says NUIG lecturer Dr Kieran Hickey, that isn’t much more than 200 years – not a long time really.

Kieran Hickey, a geographer who lectures in climate change in the university, is probably Ireland’s leading expert on wolves, although he’d be the first to remark that the field isn’t exactly overcrowded.

He has recently contributed an article on the subject to a new book Lost and Found II: Discovering Ireland’s Past which was edited by Joe Fenwick of the NUIG’s archaeology department. Later this year he will publish a full book on the subject, which has become a passion over the last 12 years, after he stumbled across it by accident while researching another project in UCC.

Kieran, who has a BA and a Masters from UCC and a PhD from Coventry University, has been lecturing in NUIG since 1999, having previously worked “all over the place”, including in Maynooth, Oxford and Armagh Observatory.

“I like to have a sideline project because a lot of the climate change work is number-crunching stuff and there are days when it doesn’t work or when you don’t want to do it,” he says of his wolf passion.

It was when he was doing research on the last 1.6 million years (which is known as the Quaternary period) that Kieran realised there was very little systematic work done on wolves in Ireland.

“I knew why that was, because the references [to them] were scattered everywhere and thin on the ground.”

As a result, it would have been difficult for any student to get sufficient funding to research a project on the animals within normal university timeframes.

So, Kieran adopted the Irish wolf as a sideline scheme, carrying out other research projects along the way while accumulating information on wolves in terms of archaeology, history and in folkore, and appealing for information along the way.

Information came from many quarters he says, including from as far away as South Africa. And he discovered one gem from 1588 when the Spanish Armada was shipwrecked off the West coast of Ireland.

In addition to the survivors being attacked by the locals as they were in Galway, a contemporary account also recounts how wolves came down from the mountains to eat the dead soldiers. Pleasant stuff indeed.

But it wasn’t all so grim. Kieran discovered evidence of wolves in Ireland going back 25,000 years – the oldest bones found in Ireland are wolf bones, he explains. And there are also many references to wolves in place names throughout Ireland. Many of those were not initially obvious, but research showed that these were ‘hidden’ in Irish place names; such as Isknamacteera in Kerry and places that contain Breagh (wolf). The surname O’Connell, meanwhile, translates as ‘strong as a wolf’.

Historical records of Ireland’s wolf population were relatively scarce until the 1400s when the English began to make a serious impression on the country, but became solid from there on, particularly during the Plantation of Ireland which began in the 16th century.

These records show that wolves were common in Ireland around the 1500s – in fact, says Kieran they survived in Ireland well after becoming extinct in England, Wales and Scotland.

That might be because the native Irish had a different attitude to wolves than the Anglo-Irish, which is illustrated by records which pre-date the English settlement.

“Irish chieftains would keep them as pets. And, yes they hunted them, but not to exterminate them. But the settlers who came in saw them as a foe and wanted to eliminate these predators.”

There was, in fact, a period between the late 1400s and the mid-to-late 1500s when wolf skins were regarded as a luxury item on a small scale and exported to place such as Bristol. In the 1300s, records in Galway listed wolf skins among taxable commodities, which would indicate a significant wolf population.

The real decline of the Irish wolf began during the Cromwellian era in the 1650s, when people were offered a bounty to kill these predators.

So wary were the English settlers of wild Ireland and its inhabitants, both human and feral that some of the incomers used to refer to Ireland as ‘Wolf land’ – there was also a belief that Irish people could change into wolves.

For more, read page 23 of this week’s City Tribune.