INSPIRE INTERVIEW: The Nature Lord, Dunsany's Randal Plunkett

Climate change consciousness and environmental awareness has all of a sudden moved to the top of the national and international agenda, but in one corner of Meath, it is something that has been on the mind of Randal Plunkett for many years, as he set about establishing a nature and wildlife reserve on his family’s Dunsany Castle estate.
The young filmmaker took on the challenge of the centuries old castle and estate before his 30th birthday, following the untimely passing of his father, Edward Plunkett, the 20th Lord Dunsany, in 2011.
It was a huge undertaking for one who had no experience of farming or property management, but who had begun to carve a career for himself in the movie industry, having studied film making in London and Switzerland. But it is one which he is embracing with a relish, with the added vision of creating an undisturbed habitat for wildlife, bird life and plants to flourish in, as those very things become more and more threatened in the modern world.
The woodlands and open fields of Dunsany are a far cry from the New York where the young Randal Plunkett grew up, and where he first developed his love for film.
“New York was quite dangerous in the 1980s and into the ‘90s, with kidnappings and such,” he explains. “You couldn’t go out to play, so we had to stay at home in the apartment. It was the era of video rentals, and we had a very good video store at the bottom of the street.
“So we’d rent a lot of videos. My father was very keen on showing me European cinema, even at that age, so for every Disney movie, we’d also have to watch something European, lots of black and white, Italian new wave. I began to get less interested in the Disney films, and more interested in European film.”
There were a lot of arthouse cinema videos in their collection, and the young Plunkett saw his first Bergman film at the age of seven.
“But I couldn’t keep up with the subtitles – I remember that being a real difficulty.”
Edward Plunkett was an artist, and his wife, Maria Alice, an architect, so there was a lot of culture in the house. “My father read a lot to us, take us to museums, he didn’t want us sitting at home playing video games all day. He was keen on art, literature, cinema, and culture, and this was all readily available in New York with its museums and galleries.”
His father encouraged him by giving pocket money for his artistic endeavour.
“He would pay me a few cents per page, per short story, or per drawing.  I’d be producing comics, illustrations and short stories. I realised I wasn’t any good at drawing – two left hands! But I enjoyed writing and telling stories.”
However, as he has dyslexia, Plunkett found scriptwriting for film easier, as the film told the story.
“Writing good literature is difficult if you haven’t a great grasp of English,” he points out.
His parents and his brother, Oliver, returned to Dunsany around the turn of the century and millennium, a place where his creative imagination could run riot.  As he didn’t drive and there wasn’t much internet around Dunsany back then, films kept him occupied again.
“There was lots of emphasis on film again,” he says. “I tried all sorts of other things. I realised I couldn’t write music at all. It didn’t help that I was only into heavy metal, so was pretty limited in my scope.”
Plunkett attended Headfort School, Kells, and completed his Junior Certificate in King’s Hospital in Dublin, before doing his A Levels in Switzerland and Oxford. He then went to university in London to study film theory.
“I finished up knowing lots about film, but nothing about making one,” he says. So he went to Amsterdam to study a  year-long video course, which was very intensive. “We learned everything, from how to create a website, to how to edit, to using a camera.”
Then, he says, he had to unlearn it all, and simply get out there and get hands on.
“The best way to learn is just to do,” he says.
“Of course, I came out of film school thinking ‘right, who’s going to hire me now?’, and nobody did! I started putting my own things together, short projects, and did it all wrong, made all the mistakes, things out of focus, wrong frame rates, and there was me thinking I was going to be the next Orson Welles.
“And I regretted that I hadn’t studied business – business plans are essential if you need to raise finance for something.”
But he soon realised that to be a director, you had to be a jack of all trades, knowing a bit about everything.
“To work out a budget, have an understanding of what you are doing, and to direct others, you have to be an all-rounder.”
So he went to work for free on lots of projects around Dublin, learning about sound, lighting, special effects, editing, on a total of about 45 projects, for others and some for himself.
A lot that never came out,” he said. “Some I’m glad that never came out.”
He had a few ideas running around his head for years, sci-fi, horror, that would get to a certain stage, and then no further, with Brexit being a recent spanner in the works for funding.
But he has just finished a movie – ‘The Green Sea’ with Canadian actor Katharine Isabelle, and Hazel Doupe, about an American writer living in Ireland, who is haunted by one of the characters from her books, who actually comes to life and appears to her. It was filmed in Wicklow, Mullingar, and Dunsany.
“There’s a reason why the gamekeeper’s house at the crossroads is painted black – it was for the film,” he says.
Plunkett eventually plans to convert some of the old stone stables and outhouses at Dunsany into a post-production studio, as he now has the skills and believes there is a dearth of such facilities.
Did the writings of his great grandfather, fantasist, game hunter, cricketer, champion chess player and champion of Francis Ledwidge and Mary Lavin, Edward Plunkett 18th Baron Dunsany, have any influence on him when he returned to Dunsany?
“He had his own style, I found his stuff difficult to read, but he had very good concepts. The irony is that, although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I would say that we are very similar in our approach to things. The things that he said are the things I find myself saying, the same pursuit of ideas that I’m reaching for.
“I don’t know if that’s a genetic thing, or just a location thing, but I find that there is a lot of crossover.  It’s not deliberate, it happens very organically. And there certainly is a lot of appreciation. It’s a bit of a shame that he is not really recognised, as he did a lot to shape the genre that we know as fantasy nowadays, and all the big names who are successful – a lot of them attribute themselves to him, like Lovecraft.”
Apart from filmmaking, he has other plans for Dunsany too.
“I had an epiphany five years ago,” he says, explaining that he turned vegan.
“I was the biggest proponent of eating steak, I ate a lot of it, and I had raw eggs for breakfast. But I realised that firstly, that it’s not good for you; but I also realised the environmental impact of it all.
“Now, I’m not judging anyone, I ate meat most of my life, but five years ago I made that step to go vegan as I believed it would be better for the environment, and I couldn’t in good conscience say that I was an environmentalist, and still indulge in things that are contra to what I’m trying to make a statement on.”
So he changed his diet, and even his clothes and shoes are vegan, not made from real leather.
The second thing he did was got rid of all the animal production off the estate, and allowed the fields become a wildlife sanctuary.
“We still have tillage – tillage is a slightly different thing, I’m encouraging people to eat plants, and we have to be reasonable, but everything else is being left to wildlife, and we are going to plant a lot of forest over the next five years.
Two fields close to Dunsany Cross have been allowed grow wild, with “weeds and all sorts of weird things taking root initially”.
“It was my little experiment. Someone told me I should harrow it and sow grass. I had a theory that it would explode with weeds, the weeds were a reaction to the chemicals in the soil, and that the minerals were exhausted, which is why we had to keep spraying and adding more things to it to keep it healthy. My idea was that the weeds would try and balance the soil, because that’s what they are there for, and I was sort of proven right.
“For the first year or two, it was the worst ragworth farm I had ever seen. I was growing thistles and ragworth. Everyone that passed thought I was the biggest moron in Dunsany for sure. But then after three years, the weeds started to go down. I used to go pull the ragworth, 20/30/40 stalks each day, no chemicals, now I don’t need to, there’s hardly any. And now we have wild plants and flowers I’d never seen before.”
And Plunkett says that because the land hasn’t been harrowed and compressed, there has been little or no flooding worth talking about, apart from around the recent torrential rains.
He says that pine martin, red kite, barn owl, and corncrake have reappeared, and he won’t mind a bit of marsh as it will encourage the snipe. He doesn’t cut grass, but allows it to grow and die, encouraging lumps that are excellent for hares, and also for insects life.  The deer are the only thing grazing the land, and there’s no compression.
“And at the same time, you are getting the oxygen back into the soil through the holes from the worms and wildlife.”
Over the next five years, Plunkett is planning to plant more trees on the estate. Sentimentalists will be sad to hear that the old cricket field will be planted, joining the railway and duckpond woods, and eventually creating a woodland tunnel on the Black Lodge road.
“They will be all native Irish species,” he says. “Holly, birch, oak, as well as lots of yew, which has no commercial value. It’ll be long-term growing.”
He will be getting state forestry subsidies on the new plantings, but says he would be doing it anyway, regardless of grants. He has taken a hit financially by taking the Dunsany lands out of active service.
“I am taking a big loss - there’s 350 acres in The Park – the lands directly around the castle, 150 on the orchard and Dispensary, but there is no reward without sacrifice. Even during the fodder crisis, I couldn’t compromise.”

Plunkett says he will just have to work harder on his film work, while there is also a property management aspect to the Dunsany holdings around the 1,500 acre estate, and in Trim. 
He is thinking about looking for official European wildlife sanctuary status, which would bring certain tax benefits, as well as certain obligations.
“I am a nature reserve, but at the moment a private one, not getting any benefits apart from the benefits of being a nature reserve but nothing financial.”
He has stayed away from subsidies for the moment, as he wanted to establish his own ideas first.
“My philosophy doesn’t always bode well with other people’s philosophy, and once you start throwing money at it, it can taint what you are doing,” he says.
As the 21st holder of one if Ireland’s oldest titles, is it a help or a hindrance?
“I don’t ever introduce myself as Lord Dunsany. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life introduced myself by title. People call me that. It is technically appropriate, I suppose. But I’m Randal. Lord Dunsany was my father. I’m from the 2000s. I listen to heavy metal on Spotify. It’s not really me. I’m not on a horse going to the social gatherings. It’s tradition, and you should never forget where you come from. But I’m not shoving it in people’s faces.
“Now, Americans on the other hand, love all that stuff. I’m in the entertainment business, and if it’s beneficial, and they want to call me that, it’s fine, I go with it. In Ireland, people are much more down to earth.”
He says it opens a few doors, but can shut them as well.
“The problem here is that people presume a lot. I get attacked sometimes, particularly in Ireland, where people have a predisposed idea of you. It’s common that I get called an English bastard or an English c-word.”
While he understands the historical reasons for the attitudes, he often gets caught in the crossfire. 
Born in New York, with a Latin American mother and grandmother, Randal Plunkett’s lineage in Ireland can be traced back to 10th century in Louth and the 12th century in Meath.
“We are lumped in with the Anglo-Irish. I can understand it, but my family is not traditionally from the UK. We are actually from the Normans, we were French actually. We came to England in the 1066 battles, and the furthest back we can go is seventh century, then it was Denmark and Norway – you’re talking Vikings at this point. Then we went to Normandy, onto the Battle of Hastings, and ended up here. But that’s 900 years ago! The family is not of English background, traditionally, we just passed through.”
Plunkett has received this abuse when he challenged strangers who had been running dogs across the Dunsany land.
 “Unfortunately I get this quite often. They presume I’m from a Cromwellian family. But we are not a Cromwellian family, the opposite, we got murdered by Cromwell.”
Plunkett, at 36, is very conscious of his family history and background, from canonised Oliver to Horace, co-operative movement founder.  He is aware of the history and heritage of Dunsany Castle, and believes that some of his great relatives would have been on the same page as him. And his father had such conservation ideas, but never got around to it because of illness. 
“He wasn’t as radical as me – I have a radical side, uncomprising.”
“Career is important,” he says. “But ultimately, there is a responsibility in my family to always leave something better – and it’s not just about my family, it’s about everybody, and not everybody is in a position to do it. To take a sacrifice or plunge like that, financially has wounded me, because obviously I am losing quite a lot of money,  but there are more important things than money, status and achievement.  What is important is keeping what we have here in this country as a whole alive. I’ll disappear, those trees I’m going to plant, they’ll be there in 200 years time.”