Earlier this week a family friend shared a newspaper article from the early 1980s by the late UK gardening correspondent Graham Rose. In it he wrote about Ireland’s 10,000-year-old bogs, many with a carpet of peat 30ft deep. Over 100 sq miles, the bog was all he could see; a vast, “horizon-to-horizon emptiness” that held a “strange, eerie beauty”.
Rose didn’t dwell on the bog’s splendour. Instead, he said it was a hostile, lifeless expanse. “An undrained bog is 95 per cent water, a hazardous place for large animals and for man.” His words reflected the narrative of the time, which I remember as a primary school kid in the late 1980s. The story of Irish bogs was one of dull, empty wastelands: bleak and sodden places with a menacing edge. If you wandered too far in, the bog might swallow you whole.
Rose described the “peasant farmers” who, for generations, had cut peat as a vital fuel source. Then, in 1946, the establishment of Bord na Móna marked the beginning of the industrial-scale extraction of peat to power Ireland’s electricity stations. When European gardeners discovered that peat was a “wondrous new horticultural elixir”, Rose wrote, a new market was created. In 1965, Bord na Móna opened a moss peat factory at Cúil na Móna bog in Laois to produce horticultural peat. By the 1980s, when Rose visited, British gardeners were buying more than a million bales each year.
Rose gives an unflinching description of how a virgin-raised bog is drained. “The attack is mounted by giant ditch-cutting machines and – more dangerously – by dynamiting and digging.” The bog is left to dry and shrink for five years, after which it’s ready for removal. Mechanical cutters with “steel teeth” carve blocks of peat, which are then lifted by “375ft arms suspended by hawsers from 60ft steel towers”. The peat is then “simply torn apart” before being compressed into bales and sold.
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A Cúil na Móna Laois peat factory manager told Rose that peat extraction would cease after 30 to 40 years, after which the “fine new” land would be reclaimed for agriculture. “At farms and nurseries on recently-reclaimed bog, magnificent beef cattle are fattening on knee-high grass, vegetables are flourishing, and hybrid rhododendrons and azaleas are growing more rapidly than anywhere else in the British Isles.”
For decades, bogs offered locals opportunities, and peat shaped their lives. In the peak production years (the 1950s to the 1980s), employment in the peat industry spared thousands of workers an otherwise inevitable fate of emigration. They worked hard, earned a decent living and brought economic vitality to towns and villages. These workers contributed an immense amount to their communities and Ireland’s energy needs at the time.
When Rose wrote his piece, the term “biodiversity” had yet to be coined. At that time, voices urging us to understand and cherish the bogs, like those of film-makers Éamon de Buitléar and Gerrit van Gelderen, were too few and easy to ignore; in later years, even legal threats from the European Commission didn’t stop the Irish government in its tracks. The dominant narrative endured: bogs were places to be drained and their sods sold for profit.
We now understand the greater cost. Home to unique species of spiders, insect-eating plants and birds on the brink of extinction, such as the curlew, industrial peat extraction has left bogs – what David Attenborough calls “cradles of biodiversity” – stripped bare and emptied of life. Bogs act as industrial-sized natural sponges, soaking up water and shielding lowland areas from floods. Unlike trees, a living, healthy bog will capture carbon indefinitely, with no time limit; they’ll soak up more carbon per square metre than almost any other ecosystem on Earth.
The language of extraction, drain blocking and industrial peat production is quickly fading, replaced by a new vocabulary centred on creation – of restoration, rehabilitation and rewetting. This shift has occurred at pace; for many people in the midlands, peat was more than just a fuel for their homes or a source of income – it became woven into their cultural heritage. Their stories must not be forgotten or left unheard.
The midland counties are now included in the EU’s €392 billion Just Transition Fund, which supports regions across Europe historically dependent on coal, oil shale, peat and other fossil fuels. Ireland’s allocation totals €169 million, co-funded by the Irish Government.
In Abbeyleix last week, at a gathering for the €12 million Tóchar Wetlands Restoration Project, funded by the Just Transition initiative, Offaly geologist, botanist and writer John Feehan recalled his time spent on the bogs in the 1950s. Back then, he said, the bogs stretched on forever – places so vast you’d need a compass if you got lost. In today’s world, it’s hard to fathom the “immense silence” offered by such great stretches of wilderness.
Under the three-year Tóchar project, a select group of degraded bogs will be put on the path to restoration. Bringing a bog back to life is a gradual process that will unfold over a timescale way beyond our own lifetimes. Feehan describes it as a recovery “not easily hurried”; one that, over centuries, will see these habitats become “richer as time goes by, as nature re-establishes its green hold over the bog”.
Bogs have offered us so much, and many are now lost forever. For the small fragments that remain, it’s a blessing that we can at least attempt to bring them, in Feehan’s words, “back to the local embrace”. Their story – one of abundance and life – will continue; all they need is for us to step back and allow time to do its work.
