Madam, - I'm somewhat bogged down by the recent exchange of letters on terms such as "peat", "turf", "peatlands", "bogs", etc, and I wonder if the really important question has been missed.
The large-scale cutting away and burning of Ireland's midland bogs can be likened to deforestation in other countries. We are told that we have 25 years' "usable" resources of turf left. At what cost?
The great bogs are Ireland's rainforest, and unless the rate of growth/replacement exceeds the rate of removal we will have to suffer the consequences in terms of accelerated rainfall run-off, leading to inundation and flooding of low-lying areas. Not only this, but the balance of our ecology will be affected on a scale which natural adaptation is unable to accommodate.
Why are our purportedly "green" paying lip-service to ecology, the threat of global warming, etc, while the balance of our intrinsic ecology is being irreversibly altered on a scale we cannot estimate? - Yours, etc,
RICH MERNE, Newbarn, Kilsallaghan, Co Dublin.