Sir, – One does so wish to take the What’s Hot, What’s Not column in the Saturday Magazine in the spirit it’s offered: presumably, a light-hearted summary of cultural tips for the cognoscenti, capturing the essential zeitgeist, week to week. Avid follower though I normally am, I must take exception to your paean to turf fires, evoking a bucolic mysticism (Magazine, March 10th).
The reality is that Ireland’s mortality rate for respiratory disease is more than twice the EU average, and Ireland, along with the United Kingdom, has a particularly high prevalence of childhood allergy and asthma. Perhaps your pundit is sentimental for the days when “smoky” coal was in widespread use, with its exotic sulphurous flavours. Prof Luke Clancy, then in St James’s, found that the ban has saved more than 350 lives every year since it was introduced in the capital in 1990.
The turf smoke you eulogise is made up of fine particulate matter hosting a range of toxic substances – some of them carcinogenic – which can penetrate deep into the lungs and promote respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
According to EPA data, domestic turf-burning was the largest single source of residential particulate emissions in 2010. Perhaps turf-burning, like so many of our heretofore cherished cultural shibboleths, should be consigned to history. A first step would be relegation to What’s Not! Sir, I eagerly await my St Patrick Day’s edition of your Saturday Magazine. – Yours, etc,