Donal Hickey: Shock at the deterioration of Irish bogs

We need to restore our peatlands before it is too late says Irish Peatland Conservation Council

Donal Hickey: Destruction of Irish peatlands continuing apace. 

Ireland’s most renowned field botanist, Robert Lloyd Praeger, wrote lyrically about the landscape and the western hills whose ‘mantle of peat-covered heath’ stretched unbroken mile after mile. He also said it would continue to be the case in future centuries.

Alas, that was in 1937 when he published his classic book, The Way That I Went, after five years of walking in all sorts of terrain countrywide. Were Praeger to return, he would find the picture had totally changed, with the bogs largely cut away and destroyed and replaced by pastures and forestry.