‘I am not going to put up with some official banning me from cutting turf ’
JUST UNDER a third of Gerry Gearty’s 90 acre farm at Bornacoola on the Leitrim/Longford border has been affected by EU conservation and habitat directives and he is not happy man.
Twenty acres has been designated as a Special Conservation Area (SAC) and his five-acre turf bank is also off limits and this has put him on a collision course with the authorities.
“I was charged with obstructing the gardai around the time the Department and the NPWS were flying small planes and helicopters over the bogs in this area on an almost daily basis,” he says.
“I have no problem with the gardai and I explained to them that I had constitutional rights to my property and they charged me with obstruction not illegal turf cutting,” he stressed.
The case has been adjourned pending the outcome of a High Court review on the constitutional issues involved in the turf cutters’ battle with the authorities.
“My turf bank is my property. I have full title on it and I am not going to put up with some official in Dublin drawing a circle around it and banning me from cutting,” says Mr Gearty.
He cut 30 hoppers of turf on the bank last year and says this rate of extraction is negligible.
“With everyone who is entitled to use the bog cutting an average of 10 hoppers a year it would take well over 200 years before the bog was affected.
“We have been cutting turf in this family back to my great-grandfather’s time.
“My grandfather cut turf at Clooneen for the Dublin market during World War II and I expect my son Shane to be drawing turf from the bog when he grows up.”
He is not interested in the turf cutters’ compensation scheme.
He is only interested in changing what he describes as the “pick and choose attitude”: of the heritage authorities to the traditional property rights of the turf cutters and farmers generally.
“They simply draw a circle around your property which immediately renders it valueless and useless. It has to stop’, he says.