The end is in sight, was the wording on a pamphlet received the other day. No letter with it, but the cutting of a piece about bracken being tested in Britain as a substitute for peat in gardens, which appeared here recently. England's own wet places and bogs are, it seems, diminishing, too. The pamphlet was, however, about Ireland. And this was an urgent appeal from the Irish Peatland Conservation Council of 119 Capel Street, Dublin, which needs money.
The Council has a plan for the conservation of a representative sample of raised bogs and indeed has a listing of 10 of them of conservation importance. Each county council has been made aware, they say, of the raised bogs in their jurisdiction. Europe is being lobbied, and the IPCC says it has exposed illegal commercial moss peat extraction on three raised bogs. Bord na Mona is not alone in working in that area, according to the Council, there are some 50 private commercial firms operating. So they promote peatfree gardening alternatives to help the cause further. You can find these in some centres.
They realise they need, in particular, the support of people who live around the bogs. If the exploitation of bogs means employment, and is not actually illegal, that must take some doing. Estyn Evans estimated that the supply of peat should last "for 500 years". The snag: he was writing in 1957. "But this makes no allowance for the increasing exploitation of peat for the thermal generation of electricity and for the extraction of by products."
Some cold facts from the IPCC 50 years ago there were 210,000 hectares of raised bog in Ireland. Now there are only 20,000 hectares left. £25 million worth of moss peat is exported from Irish raised bogs each year. Raised bogs, they say, take all of 10,000 years to grow. A man in a bulldozer can destroy one in just 10 days. "These are the facts. We can't afford to ignore them. We must act now to protect our vanishing raised bogs."