COMMENT: Head over heart on bog cutting

MY heart is with the turf-cutters in their bid to cut turf where their fathers and grandfathers cut it and in spite of a Government and an EU ban on the activity. My head, however, is with the Government on this one. It has no choice but to enforce the ban; if they fail to do it, we, the ordinary taxpayer, will be forced to pay out up to €9m a year in fines to Europe.
This is a dispute the turf-cutters cannot hope to win. If they continue breaking the law, they themselves are facing heavy fines along with terms in jail. Is that what they want?

My heart is with them because of my own background. You might say that I was born with a sod of turf in my hand. I hesitate to call myself a bogman but I was born and grew up in Kilkishen, a village that is almost surrounded by bogland. We shifted turf to many other parts of East Clare such as Sixmilebridge and Cratloe that had no such amenity.

As soon as we got our summer holidays every year, we were packed off to the bog. I broke my back turning turf, first footing it, second footing it, clamping it and reeking it. I think the sun shone every day in the bog in my youthful summers. I never tasted tea as sweet as the tea I drank in the bog, although the tea was only lukewarm, stored in a bottle that was wrapped in a wool sock. It washed down the ham sandwiches and the rhubarb tart. Those were the days. We brought the turf home by donkey, pony and later by tractor or lorry. We had enough to keep us relatively warm over the long days and nights of winter and to cook for us throughout the year.

So my heart goes out to the people who own bogs they have inherited from their forefathers but who are not allowed to cut turf on them any longer. Nothing will compensate them for having to give up what they believe is a God-given right to continue doing what their people did for generations.

However, what we thought was right 40, 50 or 100 years ago is not necessarily right today. We thought it was alright to beat the living daylights out of children at school or in the home. We thought it was alright to lock up unmarried mothers in cruel institutions where they seldom saw the light of day. We thought it was alright to build houses wherever we had property, without a thought for the environment.

Those were the days when life was simple but death came a bit early for many people.

We live in a different world now. We joined the European Common Market over 40 years ago and we are obliged to obey European regulations, which we might not like but which we signed up to over the years. One alternative is to ignore those European regulations we don’t like and keep on paying hefty fines for breaching them. Another alternative is to get out of the European Union altogether and go it alone. I wonder how many of our illegal turf-cutters want to do that.

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that the European Commissioners have completely banned turf cutting. They certainly have not. They have only banned turf-cutting on just over four percent of the overall area of bogland that is available.

But the Commissioners are losing patience with us. Back in 1999, this country signed the EU Habitats Directive, which committed us to protecting the last 130 raised bogs of conservation importance to Ireland and to restoring damaged sites to their original state. The Commission claims that 38% of raised bog habitats have been destroyed in the last 20 years because of persistent turf-cutting.

Now, the Green Party has called on the relevant minister, Jimmy Deenihan, to take “decisive action” to stop bog owners who are ignoring the ban. Their spokesman said it is unacceptable that gardaí are standing by while the law was being broken. He called for the seizure of machinery used to cut turf on these special areas of conservation.

On the other side you have a spokesman for the turf cutters asking what the gardaí “were doing coming to places like bogs”. Well, what the gardaí are trying to do is to stop people from breaking the law. They have taken names and have brought a number of people before the courts. They could seize machines but the turf cutters have formed human chains around the machinery to protect them. Of course the gardaí could baton-charge the crowd but that would only make matters worse.

My advice to curf-cutters is to stop fighting a battle they cannot win. My advice to ‘Ming’ Flanagan TD is to stop encouraging them and try to work out the best deal for them with Jimmy Deenihan’s people.