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IN 2015, BORD na Móna reported in its Sustainability 2030 strategy that peat harvesting would cease by the end of this decade.
In October 2018, it outlined plans for 430 job losses along with a revised production end date of 2025. Then, this January, the semi-state declared an immediate halt to all extractive operations.
Though not entirely unexpected, these announcements raised a number of important questions such as: How will Bord na Móna manage its 80,000 hectares of cutaway bogland? What will be the long term implications for employees who have lost their jobs?
And, what will become of the many towns and villages in the Midlands, already blighted by rural decline and outward migration, now that production has come to an end?
There are also other, less immediately apparent, ramifications arising from the bog closures. The impact on communities has largely been overlooked.
From opticians supplying safety goggles to factory workers and garages repairing employees’ vehicles, many local businesses will be negatively affected by the changes.
Role of bogs in our struggling Midlands
Ireland’s vast peatlands, once covering upwards of 20% of the island, have historically been understood in a myriad of ways. Once considered wastelands, their economic and social value was realised with the setting up of the Turf Development Board in 1934 (succeeded by Bord na Móna in 1946).
Industrial extraction of peat from raised bogs in the Midlands provided secure, well-paid full time and seasonal jobs in a traditionally underdeveloped part of the country. Further high quality skilled employment was created in the ESB power stations and Bord na Móna factories that used the peat.
The transformation of Bord na Móna has been underway for three decades. It opened Ireland’s first wind farm at Bellacorick, Co Mayo in 1992. Today, it operates a successful waste collection and recycling business alongside four other wind farms.
As this ‘Brown to Green’ strategy has been implemented, the plight of its workforce has come into sharp focus as environmental groups and trade unions call for a ‘just transition’ to support those affected by job losses.
Just Transition to support workers
The concept of just transition came to the fore in 2018 following the closure of Bord na Móna’s Littleton briquette factory in Co Tipperary where 69 jobs were lost at the plant and upwards of 50 from the surrounding bogs that supplied it.
Job loss is not unprecedented at Bord na Móna. In response to the oil crises in the 1970, it expanded operations in order to ensure a secure energy supply for the state.
Having overreached and accrued significant debt as a result, efforts were undertaken from the late 1980s to rationalise the business, clear debt and improve productivity. The workforce was downsized and those affected were provided with redundancy pay-outs.
Severance packages, however, do not meet workers’ needs in the long term. Instead, trade union movements have called for the creation of new roles in similar, albeit, environmentally sustainable enterprises. This is happening to some extent.
Those affected by job losses at the Littleton briquette factory, for example, were offered retraining, while Bord na Móna’s recycling business AES partnered with Chinese firm Sabrina Integrated Services (SIS) to repurpose the factory into a plastics recycling plant, creating 40 new green jobs.
A new role for our peatlands
Similar employment efforts are underway in the Midlands as Bord na Móna is now obliged to stabilise its post-industrial peatlands in line with the State’s increasing climate ambitions as peatlands are recognised for their ecosystem services such as the carbon sequestration and storage.
A total of 300 short-term roles will be offered to production workers to meet legal requirements to protect our peatlands. However, long-term positions on the scale seen before are unlikely to arise.
And what of the bogs themselves, or what remains of them? Bord na Móna’s peatlands are cutaway, some down to the underlying marl or mineral substrate.
Not all cutaway bogs will recover as functioning wetlands, however, as physical changes as a result of peat production means that some sites cannot retain water.
These spaces may be suitable for renewable energy projects, while some will simply ‘scrub up’ or become birch woodland, with wildfires a real and present danger in an ever warming climate.
The iconic Bord na Móna branding – translated as “The Turf Board” – may soon be consigned to history now that it is no longer “making peat”.
How the company will evolve and redefine itself in the minds of Irish society is yet another unknown in a story of transformative and oftentimes contested landscape use.
Jamie Rohu is an Irish Research Council PhD candidate in Trinity College Dublin. His research is focused on the process, difficulties and opportunities of transitioning Irish industrial bogs towards a more sustainable future.
PEAT’S SAKE Proposal
Why have authorities failed to tackle unlicensed industrial peat extraction?
The Noteworthy team wants to investigate the extent of unlicensed peat extraction across the country and try to piece together why authorities, at both a local and national level, have failed to tackle the problem to date.
More details are available here >>
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We close down our peat processing factories but now import the same material from Estonia and Germany? How goes that make sense?
@David Corrigan: wondering how is there A Green Party in Estonia of Germany or are we the only one who Votes in Green Fools
@David Corrigan: We don’t get a new Burren in the midlands…
@David Corrigan: done the same with the sugar ,the fish, beef is next .
Every garage and hardware store is selling something similar to a bale of briquettes. I tried a bale and it smelt more of diesel or oil of some description more than peat. It was extremely black so I think its coal peat and oil compressed together. A total farce that we close down our industry and yet prop up another industry elsewhere
@Hugh Mc Donnell:
Only problem is if we had continued peat production at previous levels our 80,000 hectares would one day become a total wasteland of marl and fully exposed substrate.
Then what?
Ireland’s panhandle!
Being unable to hold water, in such scenario, the prospect of turning the national asset into anything productive is gone forever. So, it was the correct decision to cease all peat production here!
The possibilities for Tourist related activities on what remains is still immense. It just needs some investment in locations closest to cities, to kick things off.
Cycle paths, walking paths, running tracks (marathons!) kite flying, drone space, model Airplanes, bird watching, falconry, guided cultural tours for overseas tourists seeking an alternative to City delights.
@Rory J Leonard: not sure falconry and drone space would co-exist! Joking aside, we are in a way losing sight of a suitable transition. Even Greenpeace see a medium term future for fossil fuels. The Greens here are ploughing without full understanding or taking time to deal with cumulative impacts. For example your ideas on what can happen to peat lands? Where is the support for that to make it happen, why was production not tapered off so as we are not importing the same material from elsewhere? It seems it’s a case of rushing ahead with big shiny green statement projects without thought on the wider issues.
@This time its personable!: ESBs talk of using Moneypoint as a hub for hydrogen and offshore wind, makes perfect sense given their facility and it’s location (freshwater source aside), they seem a fairly progressive and relatively intelligent in terms of their planning. Should they not be the ones driving this than the Greens! In time we’ll have to rip down all these windfarms and access roads built with the Greens cheering, which they pushed for without any clamour about the impact on the local environments. I’m all for renewable energy, but there rush meant delayed focus on the real big producers of offshore wind and tidal rather than damaging the environment much like they’ve associated with the Bord na Mona and the bogs.
It means we will be buying brickets from poland
Small Modular Reactors at Lanesborough & Shannonbridge would be an ideal investment in our carbon free future.
@Gavin Tobin: SMR do offer a good alternative but if there are to be used in the long term then it thorium based instead of uranium.
@Gavin Tobin:
Thank God someone has some cop on, if not the Ph.D candidate who wrote this article.
What a massive future these central bog areas have. Like you say, SMR, then data centre, each using about three times the output of the Shannon Scheme. Then the waste heat of each goes to a vast complex of 24/7/365 hydroponic grow houses, growing everything from salads, to vegetables to cut flowers, to avocados. Then next to them the Soldier Fly factories, eating the processing wastes as well as a large amount of our one million tonnes of food waste a year in Ireland alone. Then eating the larvae, the fish farms and the chicken, both at present two of the Worlds major environmental scandals. Finally after them a vast area of newly wetted bog area, to sequester carbon, phosphate and nitrates.
Anyone wanting all this in more depth just drop me a one liner to ndecg@yahoo.ie
@Nicholas Grubb: Yeah, you need stuff like that bang in the middle of Ireland for ease of distribution/transport. Key utilities and essentials from the center should allow all corners of Ireland to grow a maximum rate. If you look at Dublin, half it’s growth potential is not there because it’s the fecking sea. Need an inland city with full radial connectivity. I don’t know who’s going to pay for it though :-P
The peatlands have space. Overpopulated Dublin lacks space. If the Dutch were in charge of Ireland, they would build several hundred square kilometres of solar-heated glasshouses to produce vegetables, fruit and flowers for world export. If the Israelis ran Ireland [we'd be speaking Gaelic and Hebrew fluently of course] the peatlands would be planted with kibbutzim producing food, fruit and forests. I dare say specialist midland farms would also produce venison, ostrich, zebra, bison, guinea fowl and exotic rabbit species. But the wrong people own and run Ireland. If the ancient Romans had invaded Hibernia, cities like Dublin, Cork and Galway would be teeming with public bath houses and toilets; and all boreens would go in a straight line between Skibbereen and Sligo.
@Garreth Byrne:
Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda. If my Uncle had you know whats.
We have what we have. And it isn’t all too bad either.
@Lotus: but now things are changing and he is right put the bogs to other uses and don’t be knocking ideas that might work and I say might
@Garreth Byrne: I’m not sure what vegetables you can grow in bogs. You’d have to drain them like they did with the fens in England. Doable I suppose. They’d lose forever the Marshland environment though and all the wildlife they accommodate.
I hope that part of this student’s PhD research is living in an Irish Midlands town for one academic year. He will have to stay within 20 km of this town or within the same county or whatever the Covid rules dictate. Preferably a town or village that depended on the production of peat for employment. Let him stay in a house that isn’t very well heated or insulated because the owners cannot afford to upgrade it despite SEAI grants.
He can do his college work remotely while directly observing the impact closure of these factories has had on the surrounding community. He should have to endure a rural Irish winter in a house that does not have state of the art insulation or heating. He would learn far more doing this than sitting in a laboratory or library for 3 or 4 years in Dublin.
He may of course be from the Midlands and already know about the impact of peat industry closure, rural poverty, deprivation and unemployment. Perhaps this is why he has chosen this topic for his thesis.
I’m guessing the answer to your headline is clean air..
Wasn’t there talk of Cannabis and Hemp growing here?
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