Diarmaid Ferriter: Green Party concern on turf not snobbery

There was a time when turf was deemed to be the embodiment of Irish patriotism. Recently, I came across a 1942 publication, Towards a new Ireland: Turf – or nothing by Robert Tweedy, husband of the activist and founder of the Irish Housewives Association Hilda Tweedy. It was a time of war in Europe, rising fuel and food prices, dwindling supplies and the Tweedys were anxious that there be sufficient fuel for those in need and that turf be transported from rural to urban locations.

A key figure in the urgent turf campaign was Hugo Flinn, a Fianna Fáil TD for Cork city who was appointed turf controller in 1940 and charged with the task of overseeing the production of sufficient fuel to replace more than two million tons of coal that had previously been imported annually. This mission was seen as central to the State’s self-sufficiency during the Emergency, and the power of the State was duly mobilised, at central and local level.

It was announced in 1941 that an extra three million tons of turf would have to be cut to meet fuel needs and there were emergency orders to allow local authorities to compulsorily acquire turf banks, with provision for arbitration to facilitate compensation.

Groups partook in the pursuit and the state schemes provided much needed employment

Roughly 700,000 tons of turf was produced by the county council schemes in 1941, employing up to 34,000 people; by 1943 the figures were 417,000 tons and 22,000 employed. Private cutters, many of whom had previously been purchasing fuel, were also encouraged through turbary right, to become self-sufficient. Large numbers of Irish soldiers were also engaged, meaning a great array of individuals and groups partook in the pursuit and the state schemes provided much needed employment.

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There was little that was rosy about this campaign; those employed endured primitive conditions, poor pay and inadequate diet and it was very hard work. As well as labour and transport problems, there was overcharging and the complications of bad weather and insufficient drying time. But the efforts got the Republic through the crisis years.

Having initially been director of the Turf Development Board, Civil War veteran Todd Andrews became managing director of Bord na Móna in 1946. He relished the prospect of being a moderniser on the back of tradition and nationalism, convinced of the merits of processing peat for electricity but also for heating homes without dependence on British coal.

According to Donal Clarke’s history of the peat industry in Ireland, Brown Gold (2010), Andrews saw advanced peat development as a patriotic endeavour, “as a way of life and as a crusade rather than a commercial project” and necessary to counteract the idea that, in his own misguided words as an arch Dubliner, “the bog . . . in the Irish mind was a symbol of barrenness” and a perception that “anything to do with a bog spells inertia and ignorance”.

With the climate change crisis and concern about carbon emissions and air pollution (which the European Environment Agency estimates results in the premature death of 1,300 people in Ireland every year) the perception of turf has inevitably been transformed, but its intertwinement with various aspects of our history, along with regional and social and economic divides means the attachment to turf cutting runs deep. It is trite to dismiss all those with a deep attachment to the bogs and who use them for fuel as Neanderthals indifferent to climate change, but it is equally trite to dismiss the Green Party’s concern about this as snobbish, urban indulgence.

There is an exceptional level of double speak in the Republic about measures to tackle climate change. The regular assertion that moves to phase out reliance on fossil fuels are “yet another attack on rural Ireland” implies that this is someone else’s problem. The Green Party is far too convenient a scapegoats for the distaste that greets reminders of the difficult measures imperative to tackling climate change, with every indication the party will be whacked again coming out of Government.

They're absurdly innocent, but you can't knock their ideals

In theory, all parties are signed up to the idea, as stated by Eamon Ryan, that “the climate issue belongs to every party and community”; in practice, there is still denial, obfuscation and sneering about those who push the climate change agenda.

Consider how the patronising, faint praise of one seasoned observer of Irish politics in 1989, the year the Green Party’s first TD was elected, still resonates: “They’re absurdly innocent, but you can’t knock their ideals.” At that time, they were arguing the case for energy conservation, solar energy and wind power.

Ironically, what was required in a previous Emergency to promote turf as the only way, is now required to tackle over dependence on fossil fuels, an urgency long apparent and now further underlined by the war on Ukraine. Once again, both State and community need to mobilise together to fairly, but without denial, transform the approach to fuel to meet 21st century emergencies.