For peat’s sake: Protecting Ireland’s bogs

THE summer just past was one of the best in living memory for drying turf.

Anyone travelling the roads through boglands will be familiar with well-loaded tractor trailers drawing home winter fuel.

Indeed, machinery has made turf harvesting much easier these days, but pressure is growing for a total ban on the practice as more bogs are being declared conservation areas.

Bogs, which took up to 10,000 years to form, have been vanishing at an alarming rate because of large-scale commercial turf cutting, especially in the Midlands, while forestry, land reclamation, road building and even new housing have all been adding to the pressure.

According to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council (IPCC), turf cutting will have to stop at some stage.

However, a strong case will surely be made to allow farmers to continue cutting turf in their own bogs for their own domestic needs. A political outcry can be expected when the powers that be in Brussels inevitably try to ban a tradition stretching back centuries.

Concerns have recently been voiced about the export of Irish turf to Scotland, amid revelations the Scottish have stopped cutting their own turf; it’s believed up to half of the peat sold in British garden centres now comes from Ireland.

At current exploitation rates, the IPCC estimates all of Ireland’s unprotected raised and blanket bogs will be extinct early this century.

Indeed, some western nations can point to a date in the near future when, without direct conservation efforts, their last natural peatlands will vanish forever; for others, it’s already too late: all natural peatlands in the Netherlands and Poland have been lost, while Switzerland and Germany each have only 500 hectares remaining; in Britain, there’s been a 90% loss of blanket bogs and only 125,000 hectares remain.

The loss of peatland habitats has also been reflected in Ireland with a 92% loss in raised bogs and an 82% loss in blanket bogs; in the North only 10% of raised bogs and 14% of blanket bogs (of conservation interest) remain.

IPCC conservation officer Caroline Hurley says the disappearance of Irish bogs would have serious international consequences.

“For various plant and animal species, the last western European refuge would be destroyed,” she says. “Several species of birds would lose important wintering grounds.

“Pollen and archaeological remains preserved in peat represent a most important archive for the history of man and the landscape since the Ice Age. The education potential of peatlands is only just being realised.”

Birds such as the snipe, red grouse, skylark and curlew, which were once regarded as common in peatlands, are now very scarce; even scarcer, if there at all, are protected birds such as the peregrine falcon and the hen harrier.

Also, peatlands haven’t yet been fully scientifically examined and may contain a wealth of valuable information about climate and environmental change.

Peat is a soil made up of the partially-rotted remains of dead plants which have accumulated on top of each other in waterlogged places for thousands of years; occasionally, the trunks and roots of trees such as Scots pine, oak, birch and yew are also present — generally known as bog deal or bog oak.

Ireland is unique in Europe in that it possesses almost 200,000 hectares of actively-growing raised and blanket bogs and fens, which are of increasing European conservation importance; for this reason, the EU is interested in conserving the resource, which is acknowledged in various EU peatland recommendations and habitat directives.

Climate change thousands of years ago resulted in high rainfall and high humidity levels around Ireland, particularly in the western counties and in mountainous areas; under such conditions, the soil became permanently waterlogged and peat began to accumulate.

Peatlands originally covered more than 17% of the Republic, but the introduction of large-scale, mechanised turf extraction schemes for fuel and horticultural peat in the 1940s, forestry programmes commencing in the 1950s and the intensification of agriculture following Ireland’s entry to the EU in 1973, have seriously depleted the area suitable for conservation. Today, according to the IPCC, only 19% of Ireland’s original peatlands remain in a relatively intact condition.

A new conservation campaign is underway in Ireland to retain important peatlands.

In 1987, the government committed itself to a peatland conservation plan that involved acquiring some 10,000 hectares of raised bogs and some 40,000 hectares of blanket bogs for protection. The target for the blanket bogs, many of which are in national parks and nature reserves, has almost been reached, but there’s still some way to go in regard to the raised bogs. Meanwhile, commercial moss peat extraction continues in some internationally-important raised bogs.