ear to the ground s33e13

Movielib

ear to the ground s33e13 ------------------------------------ MOVIES. HISTORY. NOSTALGIA.  Welcome to Movielib, your cinematic sanctuary.  We explore the golden age of cinema, dust off classic films, and delve into the artistry that shaped movie history. A true library for timeless stories. Subscribe and let the reel roll!  #ClassicFilm #OldHollywood #MovieHistory #CinemaNostalgia #FilmLibrary

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to Ear to the Ground. Coming up for you on the show, Stephen is in the

00:05southeast to find out how farmers are doing after the recent flooding. Whenever you step down it

00:11bubbles up through the ground. Yeah like there's no visual crop left. There's no crop here? No.

00:17Dara spends the day in a wildlife rescue center in Kildare. So it's quite a strong

00:22pain relief because as you can imagine a fracture is very painful. And I'm in Cork meeting a woman

00:28balancing ongoing cancer treatment with a busy calving season. I know I've an incurable cancer.

00:35I have no idea how much time I have but I'm going to make the most of it.

01:00On every dairy farm, calving season is the busiest time of year. The O'Leary farm near

01:08Tower in County Cork is no exception. For Catherine O'Leary, caring for the new arrivals is more than

01:16just another job. It is a passion. Catherine, this has been your job for the longest time.

01:22I am rearing calves here in Woodside for 43 years and probably even a little bit before.

01:28And it has always been my domain. It's a skill that Catherine is now

01:33passing on to her grandchildren. So Ricky, I'm only giving them one scoop.

01:38But it has taken on extra significance since she was first diagnosed with cancer six years ago.

01:47When I can do my normal chores, I just get such satisfaction out of it. And it's a different

01:54mindset. You just must be positive and you must be resilient. And I suppose I try to be as resilient

02:00as I can. Catherine has been documenting her life with cancer in the Irish Country Living magazine.

02:07Until last year, the cancer had been responding well to treatment. But a recent scan revealed a tumour

02:14beneath her left arm. And further scans also showed a number of tiny tumours in her lungs.

02:24Catherine's cancer is now incurable.

02:28It is what it is. It's a bummer. It's not nice. There's no point in saying it's wonderful or anything

02:35like that. And I'd hate any people to get the wrong impression that she's on cloudcookle. And

02:39I'm not. I know I've an incurable cancer. I have no idea how much time I have. But I'm going

02:47to make

02:48the most of it. Catherine met her husband, Tim, when they were both just 18 years old. They married

02:57five years later and went on to have four children.

03:02We're together 50 years, imagine. 50 years this year. We met in Macra in 1976, in Balancholic Macra.

03:09So all our adult lives, we've been together and we've dealt with all the issues together.

03:15Yeah. We've talked them through and found solutions and all the rest of it. This is different.

03:19This is going to end in Catherine dying. Yeah. And we have to face up to that.

03:27OK, life has changed. It has changed an awful lot. There are days I'm a blubbering idiot looking out

03:33that window saying, I don't want to go. I don't want to leave my grandchildren. I don't want to leave

03:37my children. I just want to be here. Yeah. But I have a little cry and my main cry is

03:44usually in the

03:44field with the heifers. You know, and I go to see them and I'm saying, oh, you'll have calves in

03:48two

03:48years. Now, time now. I wonder will I be around. Yeah. But you have to put that away.

03:53It would be very easy to step in and do too much and make her a patient. And we won't

03:58do that.

03:59So she feeds her calves, the housework and stuff like that. She does most of that. I've done a bit

04:03of cooking now because she does get tired in the evenings. And that's a new adventure for me. But

04:11we try and keep it as normal as possible, Ellie. You know, we just try and put that freaking other

04:16stuff in the background. It comes out of its own accord, you know, but we keep it there as long

04:22as we can.

04:29I want to keep on. I want to keep involved. And that is the way I will beat the cancer

04:34back and get

04:35more time and more time and more time by not allowing it take hold of me. Farming has been

04:43at the heart of Catherine and Tim's life. Together, they have built a thriving business and a home for

04:49their children now all grown up. The last few years have been a difficult time for the whole family.

04:57I can honestly say for the first couple of months, definitely struggled massively

05:01with the pain, just pain, just the fear of the suffering, the fear of what she has to go through.

05:08She can't be the powerhouse she is because the week she goes for chemo, that's what it is. And she

05:14does everything she wants to do. But there's this kind of constant cloud.

05:19When we were growing up, we heard about the challenges that mum and dad had when we were

05:24young children. But now with this newest challenge of cancer, we've been able to see what their

05:31resilience is like. So you feel the strength? You can, you can, yeah, you can see it like

05:36straight in front of our eyes. I think mum did think about whether to write about it totally openly.

05:43But, um, once it was done, and she started getting letters from people who, like, you know,

05:50just say things like, my family's been through the same. Thanks so much for sharing. That's a massive

05:55list to mum. The thought that she's helped someone. And Dermit, how do you help your mum?

06:14You sound, I would like to live with you. You sound fantastic.

06:20Every family that goes through what the O'Leary's are now facing deals with it in their own way.

06:27Everyone carries the burden as best they can. How do you think Tim is?

06:33How do I think Tim is? I think he's heartbroken. I think it's terribly tough on him.

06:43I'm more heartbroken for Tim and for my family than I am for myself.

06:51You've been together for five decades. In the last few years, have you learnt anything new about Catherine?

07:01Jeez, that's a question and a half. Have I learnt anything new about her?

07:08It's certainly deepened my love for her.

07:13And admiration. Because the way she's dealing with this is...

07:20Some mornings, I don't know, she gets up and keeps going.

07:24And as a result, she makes it easier for the rest of us.

07:29So that's admiration and love. And yeah, she's great.

07:35I'll have lived 67 fabulous years on the 22nd of May this year.

07:41And you can see the legacy of my family and the whole lot.

07:45And I'm so proud of what we have achieved. And I've achieved so much.

07:51We will cross each bridge as we come to it.

07:54And I know Tim will be holding my hand. I know they'll all be there.

07:58I just want to live my beautiful life here in this beautiful place for as long as I can.

08:11That's it for part one. Coming up after the break, water-soaked farmland in the south-east.

08:16These sheds were all under water, Stephen. The calving boxes here, the main cattle shed.

08:22It was up to the lower bar and the gate there.

08:24And rescuing wildlife in Kildare.

08:38The heavy rains over the last weeks wreaked havoc in Enniscorthy, with many homes and businesses flooded.

08:45Further upriver, farms were also dealing with the rising waters.

08:50The farmers along this stretch of the Slaney are at pains to point out that,

08:55as bad as things were for them, the town clearly suffered much more.

09:00But the floodwaters did cause serious damage to their lands.

09:05Julian Ashmore and his father, Winston, run a beef and tillage farm on the banks of the Slaney.

09:11These sheds were all under water, Stephen. The calving boxes here, the main cattle shed.

09:17Sharmina was up to the lower bar and the gate there.

09:20The livestock were standing in the water?

09:22Standing in water, yeah.

09:23Wow.

09:23And we had to get them out of the sheds, higher ground into a pen, clean the whole thing out

09:28and re-bed it.

09:29So, you're just helpless. There's nothing you can do. Just watch the river rising and you're just seeing, will it

09:35drop by nightfall?

09:38Winston is the third generation of his family to farm here.

09:43He can recall just once when the flooding was as bad.

09:49In 1965, in around the 20th of November, we had three days of very torrential rain.

09:57The river rose rapidly. That was the worst I've ever experienced. This was the second one.

10:02The water in the farmyard was just part of the problem facing Julian.

10:09This entire 21-acre field was also under water.

10:14So, I'm walking on it now and it's sloppy, but it's beginning to seep out a little bit.

10:20Soak a little bit, yeah.

10:21What impact has the flooding had on your plans for this field?

10:24You're hopefully trying to get spring barley into it there around mid-March.

10:29But if this weather continues, it's going to be much later.

10:32Had this field been clouded, we would have had a lot of damage.

10:35Nothing about that is to wash the soil away off it. That's always the worry.

10:40There's very little you can do, really, here.

10:42Maybe put an earthen bank around the farmyard to stop the water coming in.

10:46But the fact that it's a floodplain, you're just, you're helpless, really.

10:51Further down the field, straw and debris in the hedgerows give a clear indication

10:55of how dangerous the flood levels were.

10:58Well, you can see where the water level was, Stephen.

11:01I mean, it's up to my shoulder there, so it must be nearly five feet.

11:04So the level of straw here in that tree, that was the height of the water?

11:08That was the height of the water, yeah.

11:09That's nearly the height of me.

11:11Julian's immediate problem is serious disruption to his sowing.

11:15But other local farmers are concerned with harvesting.

11:19Pad O'Toole is a neighbouring farmer and my colleague at the Irish Farmers Journal.

11:24For veg farmers in particular, it's been a really trying time.

11:28They have to get out in their fields every single day.

11:30And there's a lot of vegetables in Wexford and Wicklow in particular,

11:33where farmers are literally going out into the fields and harvesting by hand,

11:37because they can't get any machinery into the field.

11:40Another big challenge caused by the floods is the spreading of slurry.

11:45The season opened in mid-January.

11:48We've had rain every single day since the 13th of January,

11:51so it's not safe to spread slurry and tanks are starting to fill up.

11:54People who have a month's extra storage over what is required are now running out of storage.

11:59We need a change in the weather and none is forecast.

12:04Further inland, tillage farmer John Murphy hasn't had to deal with rivers bursting near banks,

12:09but the incessant rain has literally saturated his land, placing his winter wheat crop in jeopardy.

12:17John, it's fairly wet underfoot here.

12:19It is that, Steve, yeah.

12:21Would this be a wet field as such?

12:23It would be heavy land, but I've had winter corn here several times,

12:28and I've never seen as much water boiling up at this time of the year.

12:32This crop looked lovely all the way up along until, I suppose, maybe three weeks ago.

12:37The further we walk into the field, the worse the conditions.

12:42The soil is after breaking down and slumping as well.

12:44You see the stone coming up through.

12:45The amount of rain that's falling, I think, is the problem.

12:48I mean, that's pure silt.

12:50That's going to end up in a river.

12:52Surely that'll have knock-on effects for subsequent crops in this part of the field.

12:56Well, it definitely has done the soil structure no good anyway.

13:00Like, you still would be very worried about what that crop is going to yield.

13:04And do you think what's going to come with that?

13:06Do you think it's that crop gone?

13:07You're looking at a 38-acre field, five acres going out of it.

13:10There's a big loss.

13:12Since early January, a series of low-pressure systems brought persistent rainfall over Ireland,

13:19culminating in Storm Chandra.

13:21These patterns are a result of changes to the jet stream,

13:25an air mass high above Ireland influencing our weather.

13:29Climate change means such extreme weather events will now become more likely and more intense.

13:36Mary Burke is a professor in geography at Trinity College.

13:39So what we've got is a flood season.

13:41That's getting longer.

13:42And what I mean by that is the floods, the soils will become saturated earlier on in the season

13:47and last longer.

13:48So that whole wet winter phenomenon is with us now and we have the data to show that.

13:54It seems there is little farmers can do to protect their lands from incessant rains.

14:00And there is only limited protections to combat rivers overflowing into their fields.

14:06They will likely need to consider how, what, where and when they sow in the future.

14:13But farmers may yet have a potentially big role to play in protecting their townie cousins into the future.

14:21Mary headed up a pilot project called Slow Waters, which looked to demonstrate how nature-based solutions

14:27on farmland can help reduce flooding in residential areas.

14:32What we're looking to do is maybe ask for a piece of their land, and it's a small piece of

14:36their land,

14:37to be used for one or two days every year to hold back the floods a little bit from getting

14:42to the river

14:43as quickly as it is right now.

14:44So we want to start way up at the top of the catchment and work our way down, taking a

14:49little bit of each field

14:50and putting in structures that are very natural. We're using soil to build low walls. We're using

14:56maybe willow to make it a bit harder for the water to run along the river bank.

15:03Mary hopes that more farmers will adopt measures used in the Slow Waters project

15:08as a natural alternative to hard engineering solutions.

15:13But as things stand, there is no financial incentive to do so.

15:19I'd like to see proper studies done on it before anyone loses any land. Like a farmer's

15:26family's land for a long number of years, especially along the river Slaney, it's primed hillage land.

15:31I don't believe that one measure will stop the flooding along any river. I believe it's a lot of measures.

15:43It's 8am on a quiet Saturday morning, but another busy day lies ahead for the staff and volunteers

15:50of Kildare Wildlife Rescue. I'm here to follow them as they rescue and rehabilitate sick and

15:57injured animals and return them to the wild. Could I have somebody to do the Avery's to? Can I get

16:04you to do those?

16:06First order of business is to check on all the patients, from birds to hedgehogs to bats.

16:15But each day also sees new arrivals. Our feathers are in really bad condition.

16:21Volunteer Alice Kavanagh is in charge of triage this morning.

16:26We have less than 100 patients right now, but in the busy season we can have up to 700 animals

16:31here at a time.

16:32Wow.

16:33Yeah.

16:33We see a lot of pigeons and gulls. They are the birds that interact most frequently with humans,

16:39so they're the ones that come into trouble most.

16:44Outside rescue coordinator Pierce Stokes is bringing in yet another injured bird.

16:50It's a buzzard that's come in from just outside Athlone. It was found on the side of the road,

16:56in shock, soaking wet.

17:02Alice needs to examine the buzzard. Based on information from a member of

17:07the public, it's thought its injuries may have been sustained two days ago.

17:13The mouth looks good. The eyes look good.

17:17So he's not doing any grabbing with his legs, which isn't a great sign.

17:23Any theories as to what's going on?

17:25Probably a collision with a vehicle. The vet will do a full check on him later.

17:33Kildare Wildlife Rescue is a registered charity, largely relying on public donations for support.

17:39We'll dip her a few.

17:41All volunteers receive training in animal handling.

17:45Centre manager Dan Donagher is preparing breakfast for an animal recovering from surgery.

17:50We're just going to pop it in this side.

17:54How's he doing? He looks okay.

17:56Yeah, he's doing really well. The vet checked him on me last week and did another x-ray and it's

18:00healing really well.

18:01I had a plate put on the leg. A metal plate?

18:04A metal plate, yeah. And that'll heal and then it'll be removed then.

18:08So what's the likely timeline on this guy here?

18:12So another two weeks cage rest, then he'll move to an outside enclosure for some exercise,

18:16just get back using his limbs again for about another two, three weeks and then release back into the world.

18:22Yeah.

18:24I'm going to have a closer look at him and see what's going on.

18:27The Wildlife Rescue Centre shares some medical facilities with a veterinary practice next door,

18:33which allows the animals here to get expert care.

18:36Vet Caterine Vati volunteers at the centre in a free time.

18:40She's here to check the buzzard admitted earlier.

18:44When birds typically get hit by cars, one of the first things that does happen is they tend to break

18:49their wings.

18:50So there seems to be quite a bit of swelling there.

18:54I'm just going to carefully open it and see.

18:58There's a bit of laxative there and I can feel, I can feel some crackles.

19:03So I am concerned that he has a fracture.

19:09So it's quite a strong pain relief because, as you can imagine, a fracture is very painful for them.

19:15Is that going into his chest?

19:17It's going into his chest muscle.

19:21Caterine also inserts a cannula so that fluids can be given to stabilise the bird.

19:27Once he's stable, we can x-ray him and find out exactly what's going on.

19:34When the animals are sufficiently recovered,

19:37they're moved to the outdoor pens to allow them to acclimatise before they're released.

19:42The raven was found in Wicklow.

19:47So he was unable to fly when he was found.

19:49They are quite impressive, aren't they?

19:51They are very big and they're very clever.

19:55There are also stables here.

19:57One is currently home to some cygnets.

20:01So we have some swans in here.

20:03So these might have been picked up on the canals or...

20:06This time of year, most of our cygnets are coming in because they've crash-landed somewhere.

20:12So they're leaving their families and trying to find their own territories.

20:16With the wet roads, they often mistake the roadways for canals or waterways.

20:20So they end up crashing on the streets.

20:24Back in the surgery, Caterini has turned her attention to a kestrel brought in a week ago with a fractured

20:31wing.

20:32An x-ray is required to check on its progress.

20:35So what we do is we place them in a box and we use a gas to anaesthetise them.

20:43We always keep the box covered as well.

20:47Once the kestrel is sedated, it can be safely x-rayed.

20:51We're just going to give him some oxygen while we're x-raying him.

20:55And seconds later, we can view the results.

20:59We can see his fracture here.

21:01Is it that darkened area there?

21:05Yes, that's exactly it.

21:06Now that is a fracture that's healing that shouldn't interfere with him flying.

21:10I would at least give him another couple of weeks just to make sure that all that healing has finished.

21:18Back outside, Pierce is collecting a buzzard and a swan who are both fully recovered and ready to go home.

21:26But before we leave the centre, I wanted to check in on how the injured buzzard who came in this

21:32morning was doing.

21:33Alice.

21:34Dara, welcome back.

21:36How's our buzzard doing?

21:38So, unfortunately, Dara, the buzzard did not make it.

21:43Oh, man.

21:43If he'd gotten to us sooner, we might have been able to give him a better chance, but...

21:49He's one of the unlucky ones.

21:50He's one of the unlucky ones.

21:51We helped 13,000 animals last year, so we're bound to see some that don't make it.

21:58And unfortunately, this is the case.

22:02It's a sad moment.

22:05But I take heart from the fact that we're about to help two of the lucky ones to be returned

22:09to where they belong.

22:11Definitely the best part of this job.

22:16All right, this is good a spot as any.

22:18This is where we're going to do it.

22:19Looks good to me. Looks safe.

22:21First up, the swan.

22:23And you can let go now.

22:25All right, dude.

22:26Have a nice life.

22:30Instinctively, he just wants to head for the water.

22:32Exactly.

22:34Look at that.

22:38Then it was the turn of the buzzard.

22:46There you go.

22:47Oh, look at that.

22:50He wasn't too long making up his mind, was he?

22:53Exactly.

22:53Absolutely magnificent.

22:55Not a bad day's work.

22:56We always do a fist bump after that.

22:59All right, mission accomplished.

23:04Well, that's it for Ear to the Ground this week.

23:06Coming up for you next week, a bright future for pig farming in Tipperary.

23:10You will always have your ups and downs in it.

23:12You'll have that in every sector, in every walk of life.

23:15You take the good with the bad, and we always see the more positive side to it.

23:19Putting native breeds back on the menu.

23:22You happy?

23:22Very happy.

23:23And there's no spices or anything on it.

23:26Just a little bit of salt and pepper.

23:28Yeah.

23:28The flavor is of the meat.

23:30And Stephen is in Wexford, finding out if it can be the center for wine production.

23:35We made a lot of research, the soil, climate, and we decided that Wexford will be a very good place

23:43to grow grapes.

23:44Don't forget that this program will be repeated on Sunday at lunchtime

23:48after the farming weather.

23:50You can follow us and contact us on social media.

23:53And you can hear more farming stories on Countrywide this Saturday morning on RTE Radio 1.

24:19He's called dirg mosquitoes.

24:19You know, it's nothing, you know...

24:21There's nothing he's going to do on Sunday at the E.

24:22It's an interesting talk thataje手 should still have been,

24:23but it's part of when tinkering about the

24:24and some Flew do, there's nothing, doesn't it?

24:27I really can hear a lot of what the fighting thing is that

24:28We've tried to understand safety and what to eat things because

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended