25 firefighting goats have been moved onto Howth head to a bid to tackle future wildfires.
Wildfires raged in Howth for six weeks this summer, damaging up to 30 acres of land.
The firefighting goats are now on site where they'll be brought to different areas every day to eat gorse and in turn slow the spread of future fires.
Shepard Melissa Jeuken says: "They are good grazers. They have a large room and capacity so they can eat a lot of forage.
"Hopefully they will be able to eat their own weight in forage every day.
"For adults that is about 35kg to 40kg for the females and about 50kg for the males."
The wildfires in Howth took six weeks to fully extinguish during the summer.
The cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be as much as €250,000.
We're off to start our new Conservation Grazing job on Howth Head! See you soon Dublin. 😊👍 pic.twitter.com/VtwYYk1hDv
— Old Irish Goat Society (@OldIrishGoatSoc) September 8, 2021
Fingal County Council’s Biodiversity Officer Hans Visser explains what he hopes the goats will achieve: "The height of the gorse comes down to make the fires less big.
"It is trying to I suppose cut up the landscape into smaller bits so that if a fire happens, it will only burn a small bit of the landscape instead of the whole mountainside."
Reporting by Kacey O'Riordan
