The plant that stopped a football club isn't protected

Ballymun United is an amateur football club on Dublin's north side, out past the IKEA in Poppintree. Motto: “Ballymun and Proud.” Three pitches, an astroturf, a gym, changing rooms. They want to grow, and grow up: the club secretary told the Dublin Inquirer they're “hoping to go National League.”

To add space, they leased the field just west of the existing pitches, and in 2023 asked Dublin City Council, which owns the land, to fold that strip into the lease. The plan was two nine-a-side pitches for the underage section.

Then a club member, out photographing wildlife behind the bushes, found a plant.

O'Connor's account, from Sunni Bean's 25 June 2025 report: “I told him, get rid of it. But he sent it out to people. And that's where the problems then arose for us.”

The photographer sent the photos on. Experts identified Tolypella intricata: tassel stonewort, a green alga that lives underwater, easy to miss. Nick Stewart, an ecologist who co-created the Red List for this group of plants in 1992, helped make the call from the photo. The council told the club it couldn't proceed until the plant was investigated. The pitches went on hold.

Here's the part I keep turning over. Tassel stonewort is not a legally protected species in Ireland. Stewart says it outright: “this specific rare species still isn't legally protected.” I checked the instrument that names Ireland's protected plants, the Flora (Protection) Order 2022. Its stonewort schedule lists two: Foxtail and Slender. Tassel isn't on it. Its listing is a Red List category, Vulnerable, and a Red List category is a statement of risk, not a wall.

So the plant that stopped a football club wasn't protected. It was rare, and the council chose to be careful.

That distinction is the story. The field (shrubs, grasses, narrow channels of water, ditches likely dug years ago to stop people camping there) had accidentally become a habitat. Rare things are “indicators of better conditions,” Stewart says, and even at Vulnerable a planning authority is obliged to weigh them. Once a rare species is named on a patch of ground, caution does the rest.

Stewart thinks both things can happen: football and the plant. Keep the wet edge, move the pitch. “I suspect, because it's quite close to the edge, so that could be quite easily accommodated.” He also says the plant has got much rarer since 1992, through canal works, farm runoff, and sewage, and he has proposed raising it to Critically Endangered, pending sign-off.

Fifteen months on, I can't find a resolution in the record. The Inquirer report ends with both councils not answering and the expansion still unclear. The club's own site now lists floodlights, a 2,500-seat stand, and fundraising for a full-size astroturf pitch. The two underage pitches on the wetland are the quiet part.

Two uncomfortable things are true at once. A volunteer club that keeps local kids busy got held up by a plant most people can't see. And a scrap of Dublin wetland nobody was protecting turned out to be worth protecting.

What stopped the club was not a law. It was a habit: one person looked, then someone else took the looking seriously. That is thinner ground than protection, and it held anyway, for now. “Rare” and “protected” are two different words, and only one of them is a wall.

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Sources: “In Ballymun, a rare plant complicates a football club's ambitions,” Sunni Bean, Dublin Inquirer, 25 June 2025 (Local Democracy Reporting Scheme). Flora (Protection) Order 2022, S.I. No. 235/2022, Schedule E (Stoneworts). NPWS, IWM 116 Checklists of Protected and Threatened Species in Ireland (2019): Tolypella intricata, Vulnerable. Ballymun United FC official site.