There can be few 20th century industrial projects more distinctively Irish than the peat briquette. Most of us will feel some regret at the news that this idiosyncratic fuel will disappear from our fireplaces, when Bord na Móna ceases peat energy production in 2030.
This semi-state company has a very significant role in national life. It produced cheap fuel and energy in hard times. As a social employer it made, and makes, a contribution to slowing rural depopulation and abandonment. Its managers and technicians repeatedly display exceptional entrepreneurial and innovative spirit.
Yet industrial-scale peat production has had a high environmental price. This was hardly noticed at first. Bogs were regarded as black deserts, good only for extracting peat. But we gradually came to recognise their multiple functions: including habitat for threatened plants and animals, flood control and water purification.
More recently, we have realised their key role in climate change: they can both release and sequester vast quantities of greenhouse gases, depending on management. These functions are still only partially understood.
So some environmentalists argue that Bord na Móna should cease industrial peat production much sooner. They may well be right.
There are also questions to be answered about the plan announced this week to switch a sizeable proportion of the company’s estate to produce willow for biomass-based energy production. The carbon budget for this shift needs very careful scrutiny. So does the company’s proposal to expand its wind energy production, which will encounter objections on both ecological and aesthetic grounds.
However, the commitment from the new CEO, Mike Quinn, to “ramp up” the already excellent and pioneering work by the company’s ecological team in rehabilitating and restoring cutaway bogs is to be welcomed, for its potential contribution to biodiversity, to science, and to eco-tourism. This could, indeed, be the “historic” shift in land use the company claims.
After all, there’s a much bigger feel-good factor about visiting Lough Boora Discovery Park than there is in burning a peat briquette.