ANALYSIS:A brief helicopter trip shows the destruction wrought on bogs by continuous turf-cutting, writes PAUL CULLENa
TAKING TO the air is the one sure way of witnessing the slow death of Irish bogs.
From the height afforded by an Air Corps helicopter, the destruction wrought by turf-cutting is instantly apparent, from the incessant nibbling at the perimeter of the bog by mechanised cutters to the upheavals this is causing within the remaining surface area.
Our raised bogs are shrinking by the day, and what is left of them is deteriorating in quality.
Seen from a few hundred metres up, the diggers and cutters resemble ants tearing at the edges of a large but disappearing pancake.
This is a colour-coded demise, with the small discs of vivid green on the ground below representing the tiny remaining areas of growing bog.
Dark brown is the dominant colour, as heather thrives where vast swathes of bog are drying out and peat formation no longer occurs. Less than 1 per cent of Irish raised bog is still growing, and even that amount has decreased by 35 per cent in the past decade.
“This was the Bog of Allen,” remarks Jim Ryan as we fly over. He is a botanist with the National Parks and Wildlife Service and a 25-year veteran of bog research.
“There’s really not much left. All the big bogs are gone, and only the smaller ones are being exploited.”
Mechanised cutting at the periphery is having a catastrophic effect on the entire bog. At Carn Park Bog, for example, in Co Westmeath, wide cracks have opened hundreds of yards in from the facebank where cutting is continuing on a warm spring day.
Ryan explains that the drainage that accompanies cutting has dried out the bog and caused this cracking. This in turn leads to more drying and yet more destruction of the bog.
The same effect can be seen at Clara Bog in Co Offaly, parts of which have sunk by 2 metres since cutting began.
Over at Mouds Bog, near Newbridge in Co Kildare, the cutters are busy chomping into the turf. A mechanised digger cuts into a facebank of turf, and the extracted peat is transferred via a hopper to a macerator. The turf is then squeezed into tubes and left to dry.
This bog has shrunk to less than half its original size and only a small disc of land at the centre is still wet and growing.
Ballynafagh Bog near Prosperous was one large bog which has now split into four or five smaller areas with just 20-30 per cent of the original areas intact.
Extensive cutting means some of the facebanks cut from opposite sides are on the point of meeting up.
While turf-cutters are up in arms over the ban on cutting, Ryan points out that the protections will apply to only 139 of the 1,500 raised bogs in the country which are designated as special areas of conservation or natural heritage areas.
“Bogs were a basic part of our natural landscape and gave it character. But in 20 or 30 years they’ll be gone, apart from a few protected areas, because we’ve cut and drained the land.”
The plants and animals that thrive on our bogs comprise a small group of highly specialised species that survive on low intake of nutrients and in acid and waterlogged conditions.
At some point in the future, when the genetic technology is sufficiently advanced, we may be able to harness these plants for human benefit – that is, if we haven’t destroyed them beforehand.
Ryan accepts that in the past, there wasn’t much alternative to turf-cutting in order to produce fuel for an impoverished society.
At the same time, he says, areas of the bogs exploited by Bord na Móna should have been designated for protection, as happened in other countries.