PATRICK (PADDY) A.P. MACKIE

It is with considerable regret and sadness that we recorded the passing of our president, Paddy Mackie, who died peacefully at home on 6 March, a few weeks short of his ninety-fourth birthday.

A passionate ornithologist for most of his life, he made a profound contribution to conservation, horticulture and the arts in Ireland. Born Arthur Patrick Pringle (Paddy) on 22 March 1931, the youngest son of Jack Mackie and Kathleen Isabella Metcalfe – his mother being a sportswoman and artist of distinction. He had two brothers, John Kay Pringle and Peter Pringle, born 1927 and 1929 respectively and was educated at Mourne Grange Preparatory School near Kilkeel, in County Down, then at Loretto Independent Boarding School at Musselburgh near Edinburgh and finally at the Belfast College of Technology, now the Belfast Metropolitan College. In the 1950s he entered the family firm, ‘James Mackie & Sons’, a textile machinery engineering plant founded in 1858 by his great grandfather, James Mackie and based at the Albert Foundry on the Springfield Road and had become one of the largest employers in Belfast. Here, Paddy worked as a research and development engineer which he excelled at, eventually becoming a director. It was whilst working for the firm in 1972 that he was kidnapped by the armed republican organisation, the Soar Éire Action Group, and was released unharmed having ‘talked his way out’ after being held for a distressing eight hours. He left the firm in the late 1970s in order to devote himself to his conservation and environmental interests. Paddy had been a keen ornithologist since his early twenties and together with his late brother, Peter, had been building up a wildfowl collection near his family home on Strangford Lough. It was around this time that the brothers met the well-known naturalist, (Sir) Peter Scott, in Belfast lecturing and later they travelled to visit his wildfowl collection at his Severn Wildfowl Trust base at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, where he was then engaged in a programme saving the Hawaiian goose from extinction. In the years that followed, Paddy would join Scott on expeditions to Scotland and England, among other things, catching and ringing pink-footed geese. In 1977, inspired and encouraged by Scott’s work at Slimbridge, Paddy purchased a former brickworks and family farm on the banks of Strangford Lough and set about creating a wildlife wetland reserve, the Castle Espie Conservation Centre, which opened on 17 March 1982. A pioneering venture in Ulster at the time, it is an important wintering site for almost the entire Nearctic population of pale-bellied brent geese and home to the Province’s largest collection of geese, swans and ducks. Its development was aided considerably by Peter Scott, so much so, that it became the ‘Irish wing’ of his Wildlife and Wetland Trust (WWT) in 1989. The new centre, with its café exhibition centre, gift shop, and gallery was opened the following year, though sadly, Scott, who died the year before, never lived to see it opened. Today, it remains one of the most important nature sites in Ireland and survives as an enduring legacy to Paddy’s devotion to the welfare of Strangford Lough. If this was his crowning achievement, there were many others, not least his transformation of the barren point of Mahee Island into a remarkable woodland garden. After building a house there following his marriage in 1959 to Julie Turtle, he planted shelter belts, dug ponds for wildlife, and with the help of Julie, slowly transformed the headland into an extraordinary thirty-five acre lush woodland garden filled with choice rhododendrons, camellias, and magnolias, all thriving in this coastal microclimate he so successfully created. Visitors would be forgiven for believing it to be over a century old and is a wonderful example of how skill, determined hard work and dedication can transform the most challenging of sites into an exceptional garden. Today it boasts one of the best collections of rhododendrons in the country and this achievement was recently recognised by the Royal Horticultural Society in 2021 when he was awarded the prestigious A.J. Waley medal for his contribution to rhododendron cultivation. Earlier in his life, he had received other awards, notably in 2004 when he was made an MBE by the HRM, the Queen for his services to wildlife and conservation in Northern Ireland.

Over the past thirty years, Paddy, Julie and his daughter Tracy, have taken a keen interest in the Northern Ireland Heritage Gardens Trust, regularly attending our conferences, so we were greatly honoured and delighted when Paddy agreed to serve as the trust president in March 2019. Paddy is survived by his wife Julie, his daughters Tracy and Tara, by his sons Lee and Kerry and his wider family, including eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His legacy will endure for generations; the WWT’s tribute well summarises this legacy: ‘Paddy Mackie’s island garden on Mahee and the creation of Castle Espie remain legendary and are widely regarded as the cradle of modern environmentalism in Northern Ireland’.

Terence Reeves-Smyth
Chairman, Northern Ireland Heritage Gardens Trust