Born and raised in Dublin, Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator and also runs a farm and rewilding project near Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, Co Cork. Last year, he published An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding, about the project. He has two teenage sons. This is an interview by Sarah Caden
WHAT WERE YOUR PARENTS LIKE? My parents were both socialists. They both believed strongly in making the world a better place for everybody. And it wasn’t a dilettante thing. It was probably the biggest thing in both of their lives. I was born in London; when I was five we moved back to Ireland, to Dublin. My dad was from Westmeath and my mother was South African, from the Western Cape Province. She loved it when she first came here in the early 1970s, but towards the end of her life, she started to feel less at home in Dublin. I think that was largely a lot to do with the Celtic Tiger, a general kind of a shift towards values based in selfishness and money and property, rather than a sharing, inclusive community. She missed South Africa more and more.
DID YOU FEEL LOVED? I did. Yeah, very much. I had a tough childhood. My dad died when I was fairly young and me and my mum, we were poor. There’s no two ways about that, but there was no lack of love or solidity. She was absolutely rock solid.
WHAT ARE THE BEST TRAITS THAT YOU HAVE INHERITED? I always try to judge people by who they are, rather than who they are, if you get the difference. My mum was fantastic in that she didn’t care if somebody was a washerwoman or a top barrister. I try to follow that, but whether I’m as successful at it as my mum, I don’t know.
WHERE DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL? We moved around a lot when I was a kid, but I went to Kildare Place School in Rathmines for most of my primary education and then to The High School in Rathgar. The first few years of secondary were fine, but I think the problem was that we were living in a really rough neighbourhood that was a whole planet away from the worlds of the people I was going to school with. Most of them were quite wealthy and I was living in a council flat in Inchicore. I’d go out in the morning in my blazer and there were people literally sitting around sniffing glue out of plastic milk bottles. I nearly had to adopt two different personalities.
AS A YOUNGER MAN, WHAT JOBS DID YOU DO? I did all sorts of things, diverse things, when I was young. I worked as a bicycle courier, washed dishes in restaurants, worked on building sites, as a fisherman, a TEFL teacher. I was interested in metal sculpture, and in my later 20s, I got really interested in sculpture in stone. So I went to Carrara in Tuscany, where I spent seven years learning to carve in stone and marble, but also studied conservation and restoration of sculpture. I have a business as a sculpture conservator around Ireland and that’s been my career, I guess, but it hasn’t been my big thing in life.
WHAT IS THE BIG THING IN YOUR LIFE? The thing that really lights my fire is ecology and the natural world. In my late 20s, I bought a site in Kilmainham with the ruin of an 18th-century stone cottage that I rebuilt from the ground up, and a garden where I planted small native trees. I really loved watching the trees grow over the years and realised that I wanted to get a large piece of land somewhere and create a forest.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? Fourteen years ago, I bought a 73-acre farm on the Beara Peninsula where I now live. What attracted me to it was that it had been left unfarmed for about a century. That meant that most of the land had reverted back to wild native habitat in the form of forest, which I realised was actually rainforest. The ecosystem of the farm was in a severely degraded state when I arrived, so I have spent a lot of my spare time in the last 14 years restoring the ecology of this rainforest. Then, last September, I published a book about the whole process called An Irish Atlantic Rainforest. There has been huge interest in it and I’m absolutely delighted about that, not for myself but because the things I write about are so important.
WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU MIGHT GROW UP TO BE? At one stage, I fancied the idea of being a vet.
WHAT KIND OF FRIENDSHIPS DO YOU HAVE? I have some very good friends, but I’m also very happy on my own. Listening to a documentary recently on the radio, I realised that I’m actually an introvert but I hadn’t previously understood what that meant. It doesn’t mean that you don’t like hanging out with people or that you don’t like people. I love hanging out with people, but then I need to go off and spend time in the woods and recharge my batteries. It might go back to being an only child, when I had to be quite selfsufficient, but it might be just temperament.
“As the father of two teenage sons, I think it can be difficult for young fellas to understand what’s expected of them.”
DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE #METOO MOVEMENT HAS MADE MEN MORE FEARFUL OF OVERSTEPPING BOUNDARIES? I would say so and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. We’re coming from a place in which it was taken for granted that men were this and women were that, and we’re having to learn that that’s not the case.
DO YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS ON HOW MEN’S MENTAL HEALTH COULD BE BETTER SUPPORTED? I think it’s important that society understands that it can be quite difficult for men. As the father of two teenage sons, I think it can be difficult for young fellas to understand what’s expected of them and what way they’re going to be valued. The old traditional roles are gone, but what replaces that?
WHAT ARE THE THINGS YOU DO THAT KEEP YOU SANE? Having a relationship with the natural world. I would struggle if I didn’t have that.
WHAT IS YOUR STYLE SIGNIFIER? I started wearing a beret when I was about twelve and wore one for decades. Then for about 20 years I didn’t wear one, but recently I started wearing one again.
I BUY MY CLOTHES … Only when I need them. I’m not somebody who feels the need to wear fancy clothes. I can dress up sharply if I want to, but if I’m at home and fumbling about the farm, I’m quite happy to wear old shirts with raggedy collars or whatever, because then I don’t have to worry if they get torn on barbed wire.
MY FAVOURITE SHOES ARE … A pair of boots I bought in Livorno a long time ago when I lived in Italy. Even though they’re very old now, my sons know which ones I mean if I ask, ‘Have you seen my fancy boots?’
DO YOU HAVE A SKINCARE ROUTINE? I do not.
WHAT DOES YOUR EXERCISE ROUTINE INCLUDE? I do press-ups every morning and if I remember, I practise the Alexander Technique, which just means lying on the floor in a certain position for about ten minutes. I usually put on some classical music when I’m doing it.
WHAT IS THE BOOK YOU READ MOST RECENTLY? I’m reading Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, about fungi.
CAN YOU SPEAK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE? I’m fluent in Italian. I spent seven years living in Italy. My former wife is Italian and we communicate mostly through Italian. She lives near me. Our sons can speak Italian too but really, they’re Beara boys.
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