Protecting Ireland’s peatlands
As fuel costs skyrocket, rules aim to curtail practice many view as their cultural right
LULLYMORE, Ireland — For centuries, the Irish have used peat from bogs to fuel the home fires. Stories of families coming together to bring home “the turf,” as peat is called in Ireland, evoke idyllic memories of a poorer but simpler life on the land. But now the Irish government, in the name of fighting climate change, conserving habitat and improving air quality, is moving to restrict the use of peat — and finding that it is not easy.
Ireland has more than half the European Union’s remaining area of a type of peatland known as raised bog, one of the world’s rarest habitats and, scientists say, the most effective land form on Earth for sequestering carbon.
“The bogs are our Amazon rainforest. They are where most of our carbon is stored,” said Eanna Ni Lamhna, a botanist and author.
Yet despite domestic and European laws that now ban the cutting of turf on many bogs, Ireland has so far proven unable, or unwilling, to stop people who insist on exercising what they see as their traditional right to cut turf.
Last week, the European Commission warned Ireland that it must do more to protect peatlands, citing a discussion about regulations that began more than a decade ago. In a report, the commission said that Irish citizens were openly defying the laws that restrict cutting on protected bogs and that even those laws were too lax and failed to meet European goals.
The Irish government now has two months to put teeth into the laws and say how it will enforce them, or face steep financial penalties in the European Court of Justice — a challenge that comes as European countries are struggling to keep heat affordable.
Meanwhile, on Oct. 31, new regulations designed to improve air quality will ban the sale of smoky fuels, including turf, a move that the government hopes will reduce public demand. But turf will remain freely available through informal channels, and rising fuel costs, due largely to the cutting of Russian gas supplies to Europe, have made peat even more attractive as a fuel source.
The culture of cutting turf is ingrained in older generations as an emblem of rural self-sufficiency. One in seven Irish families still rely, at least in part, on peat for heat.
Luke Flanagan, an Irish member of the European Parliament, said he can have a winter’s worth of turf cut for about $490.
Although the trade is largely unregulated, turf cutting was widely reported to be at a high last summer as families and private contractors hurried to stockpile turf in advance of the October ban.
Bog derives from the Irish bogach, or “soft place,” and 17% of Ireland’s 27,000-square-mile national territory was originally covered in peatland. The majority was drained for pasture and forestry or cut for fuel, leaving only one-quarter in a state fit for conservation or restoration. Ireland has less than 0.5% of the Earth’s land surface but up to 2.6% of its “blanket bogs” that form on uplands and shorelines.
Faced with the threat of EU penalties for failing to adequately protect its bogs, the Irish government says it “strongly contends” that the EU has not fully considered the investment and resources that it is putting into bog conservation, which it says have already greatly reduced the amount of turf cut since 2011.