Clara Bog, one of the largest relatively intact raised bogs in Ireland, is subsiding at the rate of 10 cm a year, a senior D·chas official has warned.
Mr Jim Ryan, who is responsible for the heritage service's bog restoration and management programme, told a conference in Portlaoise last week organised by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council (IPCC) that the internationally famous Clara Bog was suffering "enormous rates" of subsidence.
"The bog has subsided about eight metres over the past 160 years," he said yesterday. Clara, also known as Lough Roe Bog, covers an area of 660 hectares.
Two-thirds are owned by D·chas, with the remainder in private hands. It is a national nature reserve as well as a special area of conservation (SAC), legally protected under the EU habitats directive.
The subsidence is particularly noticeable on the western side which is divided in two by a road built in the 1850s, with a drain along either side. "We have done a great deal of work in attempting to stop the subsidence, putting in about 140 km of drainwork," Mr Ryan said. They also experimented with dams, but this was less than cost-effective. It was much too expensive at a cost of about £600 a metre.
Nonetheless, those areas where D·chas has intervened to stop the subsidence had shown some improvement overall, a fact borne out by the IPCC's education officer, Dr Catherine O'Connell, who has just visited the site.
"Mosses are coming back in some profusion and these are the things that form the peat," she said. This is in contrast to 10 years ago when an entire lake, Lough Roe, disappeared.
The areas in private hands are used extensively for turf-cutting, which is at the heart of problem.
A long-running dispute between D·chas and local plotowners over turbary rights has dragged on for years. The Minister for Heritage, Ms de Valera, backed down two years ago and gave permission for turf-cutting to continue for another 10 years.
This was despite the fact that in 1995, the Office of Public Works had expressed serious concern that turf-cutting by private landowners on the perimeter of Clara, threatened the fabric of the raised bog by leaking water from it.
Geologists warned that the bog was in danger of "bleeding to death". Continuous turf-cutting on the fringes was hastening the destruction of the raised bog, Mr Ryan agreed. "When you start to dig away at the margins, it starts to drain. When it drains, it starts to subside from the original surface down to a lower level."
This means that vital wet areas are drying up and, with some 5,000 people continuing to cut turf on SAC bogs, the problem is substantial. "It's their right to cut turf. We don't have compulsory purchase order powers." Everything must be done by negotiation and agreement.
Dr Peter Foss of the IPCC told the Portlaoise conference the onus was on the Government to designate at least 60 per cent of the raised bogs in the country as SAC areas as they were priority habitat areas under the EU directive.
Ireland accounted for 51 per cent of raised bogs in Europe, he said. "That makes Ireland the headquarters of intact raised bogs." He said another 6,000 hectares of raised bog should be designated. He referred to a number of non-SAC bog sites in the midlands visited last week by conference delegates. "If any of these sites occurred in their countries, they would have been put forward for conservation designation."
Some 82 per cent of Ireland's original raised bogs had already been lost, he warned.