Ireland’s peatland paradox: Restoring bogs while commercial extraction continues

The taxpayer is helping fund  rehabilitation to undo decades of drainage on one set of bogs, while environmental authorities are simultaneously having to pursue unauthorised commercial extraction on others

Why are we spending public money repairing the effects of peat extraction while commercial peat extraction continues elsewhere? Picture: iStock

Ireland is spending serious money putting water back into bogs we once spent decades draining. Across the midlands, drains are being blocked, water tables raised and former industrial peatlands rehabilitated. It is quite a reversal. Landscapes engineered to make peat dry enough to harvest are now being engineered to make them wet again. Bord na Móna reports that around 20,000 hectares of peatland have now been rehabilitated under its Peatlands Climate Action Scheme by late 2025, of which 7,273 hectares have been restored to peat-forming conditions. The Government has committed €108 million to a rehabilitation programme covering roughly 33,000 hectares of former peat-production lands, with further investment planned through to 2030. This is significant environmental work. But it also creates an awkward question. Why are we spending public money repairing the effects of peat extraction while commercial peat extraction continues elsewhere, sometimes outside the environmental rules designed to control it?

Before anybody reaches for the turf basket, an important distinction is needed. This is not about somebody cutting turf for their own fire. Domestic turf cutting has a different cultural and regulatory history in Ireland. The EPA's recent enforcement work is specifically concerned with large-scale commercial extraction, which is peat being extracted in the course of business. Its 2025 investigation explicitly focused on commercial operations rather than domestic fuel cutting. However, commercial peat extraction itself is not automatically illegal either. An operator extracting peat commercially over 50 hectares needs an EPA Integrated Pollution Control licence, along with planning permission and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Between 30 and 50 hectares, planning permission and EIA are required. Even below 30 hectares, those requirements can still apply where significant environmental effects are likely. In other words, 50 hectares is a regulatory threshold, not an ecological invisibility cloak. The difficulty is enforcement.