there’s a lot of ordinary citizens out of touch with reality too… EU environmental laws are this countries saviour.

Gavin Tobin
Is that true ? can you post links to that statement , because all I can see , and speaking as a city girl, the bogs are these people’s property on their private lands . The EU in my humble opinion , are interfering where they are not wanted or needed . They know nothing about our turf cutting heritage .

Susie, there are no absolute property rights in Ireland. You can’t do what you like on your own land, there are laws for planning, conservation and much more. If they feel they have been hard done by they should take a case to the high court. Why haven’t they done this? Just because something has been done for years doesn’t mean it should continue indefinitely.

A few things to note:
Bogs are unique and important ecosystems. All natural bogs in the NW Europe are gone. In the United Kingdom there has been a 90% loss of blanket bogs. Ireland is the last country in Western Europe with significant bog left.
Due to overexploitation by BNM only a small proportion of Ireland’s vast bogs is still of conservation importance (AKA the bogs at issue here)
The structural aid we got from the EU (back in the good old times) to build our roads, motorways, sewage treatment plants, water treatment plants, engineered landfills, new schools, modern playgrounds, Luas system etc etc was given on condition that we PRESERVE our remaining best quality bogs.
A lot of families with turf cutting rights “rent” out their lots to other individuals to cut turf, so it’s also a loss of income as well as a fuel/tradition issue. However as this is done on the black market they can’t publically mention it.

I bet all these clowns voted yes for Lisbon lol

“I deplore the fact that we have a member of Dáil Éirenan who has consistently misled those who have, in the past years, had access to cut these bogs, as to what the current position is,”

“illegality and breach of the law”

Who does he think he is?
”Henry the 8th” ?

Ouff with their heads!!!

Keep going on like this Alan, and we will have to hire a translator for you.

Yup the country was voting yes to rubbish we knew nothing about,

Has nothing to do with Lisbon or Fiscal Compact Treaties

Not the protected ones.

but why declan is this a protected bog? have you any idea the amount of bogs that are around the country that people dont actually need and are not protected at all? what people don’t realise is that the turfcutters themselves actually know a little about the environment and actually before it became cool for the tree huggers to protect bogs country folk were actually doing it naturally. A bog is open and cut for a certain amount of years (from memory it was for 7 years) then that bog is left to grow back and another bog is open.

I see your point aine. I remember the bogs up in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains but to me it was a scarred landscape. How long before all bogs disappear?

@Aine There’s a finite amount of bog that people can viably cut given it can’t grow back within our lifetime so at some point (which may have already happened) people are going to be coming back on bogs already cut. Bord na Móna may cut on an industrial scale but that’s not the issue here. I grew up in Roscommon so I am familiar with turf-cutting (I spent plenty of summers on the bog) but we need to get over the short term ‘my land’ thinking here. Many of these bogs have been recognised as having heritage value for decades – this hasn’t been suddenly dropped on people.

@AinenTurf cut from bogs can be up to 5000 years old – they do not just ‘grow back’ if you stop cutting them for seven years!nI can understand the ire of the cutters if they are similarly uninformed and like you they genuinely believe the fallacy that it will just grow back.nIts not classed as a fossil fuel for nothing!

Well Bord na Móna cut tons of turf a year on an industrial scale and they can cut all they like.

But these guys who’ve been doing it for all their lives and have said they only need around 2% of the bogs allowed for them to cut aren’t…..

These turf cutters aren’t the problem. It’s the Bord na Mona monster machines that have brought about this situation :(

If they had of given the land back to the turf cutters the government I mean the eu would have retained more than the percentage they were asking for in the first place it was seen as a compromise I suppose

Yes, because us townies don’t know that the ban is on cutting turf from a tiny percentage of raised bogs, which Bord na Mona doesn’t cut from and which are ecologically irreplacable; nor do we know that large compensation packages were offered to the people now protesting.

Not every protest has merit lads.

Don’t worry dude the city folk will die off fairly fast with a nice virus or power cut

Spot on Peter
Or heaven forbid their Pizza delivery boy was late,or their Sky got cut off

Only a culchie would say that.
(damn, I just broke a nail!)

Well put!! It never ceases to amaze me how people who haven’t a clue of the importance of bogs as our source of fuel continue to lecture us on how important they are. While I agree that some have to be protected, but they’re there to be used. I do wonder how many of these know-it-alls know what a bog looks like, know where to find one, and if they’ve even been in one!!!!!

Only for snorkelling purposes Mark.

*hehe*
Funny one there Harry, posting on an internet website about how townies should stay out of the country :D

I’m glad that all yee city guys and gals have taken a little time out of yer busy schedule of getting your facials and sipping your pasturised Mochachinos through your soft teeth to debate this issue.

Maybe yee will be inspired to make a ”brave” crusade down to your local country markets (to buy some hummus).
But beware!!! you don’t know what flesh eating parasite may be lurking in that bit of soil on those ghastly unwashed carrots at the vegetable stall.
So I advise you to go fully prepared with your Hunter Wellies and you full body germ suit.
http://slightlychristopher.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/picture_091.jpg
And maybe a bit of factor 50 (just in case its an outdoor market).

Ah rest easy there Henry; we all do our shopping via Tesco online anyway, to minimise contact with other nasty humans.

BTW, is that a mac or a PC you’re using there?

Macbook pro 15” 8gb 2.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
(With OCZ Vertex 3 Series SATA III upgrade)
Only the best for us ”culchies”

Sorry
(With 480 GB OCZ Vertex 3 Series SATA III SSD upgrade)

But I’ll probably be going 512GB Vertex 4 soon.

But where would you feed the turf into?

Same place as always.
Feed it to the city folk as souvenirs (in exchange for their borrowed cash).

http://islandturfcrafts.com/
http://www.shopirishwithmoytura.com/crafts/turfproducts.html

Excellent point Aine, well thought out and persuasively argued.

More of this please.

Aine
You are absolutely correct , fair play to you ,do not allow any one to tell you what you know to be the truth.
People Power.

Civilized?

First the fishing and farming.

Now this.

Eurogovernment expects us all to do our hunting and gathering in their multi nationals.

Aldi farming?
Lidl hunting?
Tesco fishing?
Or how abut McDonalds foraging?

Another step in their agenda to get you all eating their mass produced garbage so you’ll have to pump yourself with their expensive pharmaceuticals, just to bear the pain of living??

The Gardai use force to defend Shell but oppose a family cutting their own turf, hardly in line with the aspirations people who fought for this state aspired to achieve.

Harry marcopolos deserves comment of the week for that !

The majority are with the government on this. Most people see the bog’s value to the nation and as a resource to be pilfered by a privileged few.

Or cutting off seal heads.

”Time to come down on these greedy idiots like a ton of bricks and don’t let it roll on like the Corrib gas debacle”
You left out paying dead banks and unsecured bond holders !!!
There is nothing greedy about these turf cutters.
THey are trying to protect their livlihoods just as the vita Cortex workers and Game and La Senzaetc etc. Enough is enough.

serious devide between urban & rural in this small country ..shocking

The illogical divide in the minds of many in Dublin between people who live in a small city on a small island and the rest of the people who live on the small island is amusing. “Culchie” is a meaningless term to try and describe everyone who doesn’t live in the capital city! If serious the use of such a term surely reveals in it’s user a degree of small mindedness and parochiality akin to the proposed mental primitiveness of the “culchie”. Either that or its done insincerely to try and portray anyone not from Dublin as somehow inferior which is equally primitive obviously.

yes i think urban & rural areas should support each other if the real situation is reviewed on a factual basis and not on stereotypes this country is too small to be divided just by your where your from..there is alot of resentment in Ireland and people are starting to dislike each other instead of the stupid laws that people are forced to live under..big business is crippling the small guy and imposing such huge fines is the answer to all protest..people just want some fairness in society and are tired of been pushed around this could get nasty for government ..

Hi Gavin
Still waiting on a response

I got rid of it dude

he’s just trigger happy on the delete button…Gavan have you delete 3 or 4 comments from me on this article i can’t remember???

Alternative (unprotected) bogs have been offered to the cutters.

@mattoid in many cases this is not the case – and a bog a further 2 hours drive away is hardly an alternative given the amount of time people need to spend going back and forth to them. Then many bog owners have a limited number of people they let cut off the one area (so as not to damage it) a higher concentration of cutters in a single area is much more damaging. The bogs the everyday people cut equal less than 10% of all of Ireland’s bogs, let these people continue to cut their 10% and save the other 90% instead – not that hard to figure out -

Poppy, I take your point about having to drive further to cut turf, but thats why compensation has been given in addition to alternative sites, and 2 hours is a wild exaggeration – there’s not a cutter in the country that has to drive for 2 hours to get to the alternative site.nWhat you seem to fail to grasp is that not all bogs are the same – a small percentage are ecologically pristine and abound with wildlife. That’s why they are protected, and that’s why cutting has been banned in these areas. Other areas are already ecologically degraded in some way and that’s why cutting is still permitted and why they are being offered as alternatives.nThe protected areas are the last tiny intact remnants of the raised bogs which once covered most of central and western europe, the others having all been destroyed by man already, hence why the protected areas are so valuable from an ecological point of view.

Firstly, in terms of methane and CO2 emissions burning turf actually is far more damaging than burning imported oil/coal. Surprising, I know. But our bogs are of global importance for their ability to soak up carbon dioxide.

Secondly, you may regard a day out on the bog as amazing, but personally I always found it to be a monumental pain in the ass! Each to their own, I suppose.

@ Eoin. Spot on. I HATED days on the bog. Whatever the pros and cons of the argument here, people shouldn’t try and justify their position with nostalgia!