Grey Squirrels
Debate between Martin Vickers and Virginia Crosbie(1 year ago)
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Martin Vickers (in the Chair)
I will call Virginia Crosbie to move the motion and then the Minister will respond. As is the convention in 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up the debate. I call Virginia Crosbie.
Virginia Crosbie (Ynys Môn) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered control of the grey squirrel population.
Thank you, Mr Vickers, for the opportunity to hold this important debate on control of the squirrel population. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison)—a fellow atomic kitten. It was while we were visiting nuclear reactors in Finland recently that we discussed this important debate.
In the 1909 poem “An Appointment” by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, he described the red squirrel as “proud” and “wayward”, bounding and springing around the trees with a
“fierce tooth and cleanly limb”.
He finished by saying:
“No government appointed him.”
Just two years after he wrote those words, American grey squirrels were introduced to Ireland and, as has been the case across much of the UK, this hardier and more aggressive species took over, pushing the red squirrel out and threatening its very existence. Although no Government appointed the red squirrel in Yeats’s poem, it is clearly up to our Government to reappoint red squirrels, a much-loved native species, to their natural homes. Grey squirrels are a menace to British biodiversity. They have proven perilous for our native red squirrel population.