In Ballymun, a rare plant complicates a football club’s ambitions

Ballymun United Football Club wants to grow. 

Out near Ikea, they’ve developed three pitches, an astroturf, a gym and changing rooms – and they want to add floodlights, says club secretary Bernard O’Connor. 

They want more space too. But they’ve run into issues.

“We're hoping to go National League, and that's why we're trying to get all this tidied up and developed,” O’Connor said. 

They leased a field beside their current pitches as part of that effort, he said.

The land, just west of the existing pitches, is owned by Dublin City Council, but sits just inside the boundary of Fingal County Council. 

Right now, that field has shrubs, grasses, and narrow channels with water and water plants. 

“In 2023 we submitted a request to renegotiate the lease to include the remaining portion of the site,” O’Connor said. “This was to allow us install two nine-a-side pitches for our underage section.” 

It was all going fine, he says. Except “A member of the club, who's a photographer, was over photographing wildlife behind the bushes, and discovered the plant.” 

And it turned out to be a very rare plant. O’Connor was not happy, he says. 

“I told him, get rid of it. But he sent it out to people,” he says. “And that's where the problems then arose for us.”

Last year, “in a phone conversation with [the] city council parks section we were told that it cannot proceed until the matter of the plant found on site was investigated as it was a rare plant”, he says. 

“I've never seen the plant. If I’d seen the plant, I'd pull it up and throw it away,” O’Connor says.  

Isn’t he concerned about preserving biodiversity? “We're just about football. We want to grow grass that we can play football on,” he says.

Ballymun United FC helps keep kids from getting into trouble, O’Connor says. Biodiversity might be important, but football is fundamental too, he says.

People who are dedicated to the local wildlife have a different perspective. They think preserving this plot of land this rare plant has grown in is crucial.

And, says ecologist Nick Stewart, there should be a way to develop more of the site while also maintaining a habitat for the rare plant. 

The rare plant

The photographer sent the photos of the plant on, and experts identified it as the rare aquatic plant: Tolypella intricata, tiny green alga also known as a tassel stonewort. 

It grows in clean freshwater, under the surface, and is just a few centimetres tall, making it easy to miss.

Stewart, the ecologist, who co-created the Red List for charophytes – this type of plant – in 1992, says he helped identify the tassel stonewort from the photograph. 

The Red List of Threatened Species is an “objective methodology to assess the conservation status of different taxonomic groups”, according to the National Biodiversity Data Centre.

"The process is actually quite a sort of regimented process,” Stewart says. “The principal idea is a sort of calibrated risk of extinction.”

Tassel Stonewort has become very rare, Stewart said. In the 1992 assessment, it was listed as “vulnerable”. 

“At that time we'd seen it in the Royal Canal, so that would have affected what we decided on, that way we might have said, 'Oh, this is not a problem,'” Stewart said. “But now the situation's got a lot worse.”

It’s going to be named as critically endangered when the new Red List – which he’s working on – comes out, probably later this year, he said.

“So it’ll be the top category. Because there is every possibility that the sites where it is – that it's not going to hang on. Which is quite different from when you made the first list.”

Other than this field, the other place the plant is found is on the Grand Canal, by The Barge, Stewart said.

He said the plant has declined rapidly due to work on the Royal Canal, as well as runoff from agriculture, and sewage, general environmental degradation. 

“In general, this is a problem with water plants because of agricultural runoff and sewage, which helps aggressive plants, so it changes the ecosystem underwater,” he said. 

He said the plant is usually about 30 cm tall and lives underwater, so it’s not easy to spot. 

“It's called tassel, because it branches in a very sort of tassel-like way, which has these very dense heads,” he said.

“I mean, it's not the most spectacular plant,” Stewart said. “But it's interesting because it’s such an ancient group… sort of a missing link between algae and flowering plants.”

He also said that the discovery doesn’t mean football can never happen there.

It might be that they can create other ponds around the football pitch that recreate some of that habitat. 

“I don't think it needs to be a hard and fast: 'We’ll put a fence around this, and nobody will touch it,’” says Stewart. 

A wild-ish area

The origins of the ditches where the plant was found is dark.

They were likely dug to discourage people from camping on the site, or using the space to hang out, says Muriel Farrell of the Ballymun Biodiversity Action Group. 

But they accidentally created a valuable habitat, she says. And now she and others want to keep it wild-ish.

This field is now a link in the local network of greenspace, says Stephen Hayden of Ballymun’s Muck and Magic Community Garden.

“We're trying to do, you know, we're trying to do green corridors across Dublin City that link spots,” he said.

So for example, the community garden he contributes to, which is full of strawberries, raspberries, cherries, plums, native apples, potatoes, onions, and more – can help spread seeds and insects and natural life, he says. 

The discovery of the tassel stonewort is maybe “an indicator of the potential for the area, and maybe something that you know should draw our attention and raise a flag to say, we need to protect this space”, he says. 

Ecologist and environmental consultant Mary Tubridy, who developed Ballymun’s 2008 biodiversity action plan, also says she wants this site preserved. 

Not so much because of the tassel stonewort, just because it’s kind of a wild area. “I must admit, I'm, it doesn't bug me too much if things are rare or not,” Tubridy says. 

“It's just the quality of the, you know, having a natural area where things are allowed to grow wild without too much interference,” she says. “That's, that's the most exciting.”

Says Stewart, the charophyte expert: “Often the rarer things are actually indicators of better conditions."

What’s next

It is not clear how exactly the photographer’s discovery of the plant held up the Ballymun United FC’s expansion to this site next to its pitches. 

O’Connor, the club’s secretary, said, “They [Dublin City Council] held it up for us to proceed with this because they wanted someone to come out and have a look at the plant.”

Neither Dublin City Council, nor Fingal County Council have responded yet to queries about the discovery of the tassel stonewort, or the site’s future.

According to Stewart, the ecologist, this specific rare species still isn’t legally protected, but the word will have gotten out.

“In the new revision it will be critically endangered, subject to NPWS [National Parks and Wildlife Service] confirmation of my proposal,” Stewart said. But they already have seen my background information and my draft recommendation that its threat status needs to be much higher risk based on the situation now.”

He said, “even at its previous ‘vulnerable’ status the planning authority would be obliged to consider it in their planning judgement”.

Right now the plant isn’t clearly protected, but so far the council has been exercising caution, and the new version of the Red List will better protect it, he says.

Stewart still said there’s options for the football club. He thinks they can still develop the land and the plant can be safe too.

“I suspect, because it's quite close to the edge, so that could be quite easily accommodated.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.