Mr. Pádraic Fogarty:

We are grateful for the opportunity to address the committee. The Irish Wildlife Trust, IWT, was founded in 1979 for the purpose of raising awareness of Ireland’s unique wildlife and its importance to people, while also promoting better protection for nature through national policies and legislation. We are a registered charity with a membership base of approximately 800 people. We have a headquarters in Dublin along with branches in Waterford, Galway, Laois, Offaly, Kerry and Dublin. Much of the work we do is undertaken on a voluntary basis.

The work of the IWT and similar organisations has become all the more pressing in recent years as the full scale of the planetary ecological crisis becomes apparent. Scientists say that we have perhaps 12 years remaining to avert dangerous climate breakdown, while in October of last year a report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London showed that 60% of large animals have disappeared from the Earth in the past 40 years. Indeed, it is widely believed that we are in the middle of a mass extinction event, which is leading to the collapse of ecosystems and which has very uncertain consequences for us all. This has affected Ireland as much as any other country.

Over many thousands of years Ireland’s unique geography and climate has produced peatland and bog landscapes of global significance. In historic times, they were home to a diversity of habitats and wildlife, including vast woodlands and wetlands with teeming birdlife and specialised plants. These landscapes were also inhabited by people. There is evidence that turf was harvested for fuel going back many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The IWT accepts that turf cutting for domestic use has a long cultural heritage and that people have well-established turbary rights, which should be respected. However, we must also acknowledge that major changes have occurred in more recent decades that have had calamitous consequences for our peatlands. It is no exaggeration to say that the raised bogs of the midlands are practically extinct. According to the NPWS, less than 1% of the original area remains active or capable of growing peat, while no raised bog has survived intact. The vast blanket bogs of the west and upland areas have fared little better. Only 28% are deemed worthy of conservation and the remaining 72% have been drained for agriculture, turf extraction or are buried underneath a carpet of plantation conifers. Even those blanket bogs within so-called protected areas such as SACs and SPAs have been subjected to overgrazing by sheep, uncontrolled fires and unregulated turf cutting, and these activities are leading to their deterioration. Of 11 habitats on peatland listed for special protection under the EU’s habitats directive, nine are in "bad" condition, one is "inadequate" and only one is "good", according to the NPWS. With habitat degradation comes extinction and, according to BirdWatch Ireland, ten birds which are characteristic of peatlands are on the red list, meaning they have suffered catastrophic declines in population or breeding range, namely the golden eagle, red grouse, golden plover, dunlin, curlew, twite, whinchat, nightjar, meadow pipit and ring ouzel. A number of other birds such as the skylark, the hen harrier and the short-eared owl are on the amber list. The hen harrier is currently threatened with the prospect of more planting of conifer monocultures, which will destroy its habitats. Wind turbines are being inappropriately erected on peatlands where their contribution to climate goals is likely to be less than the greenhouse gases being released by the degrading peat, while, at the same time, harming water quality and aquatic life downstream.

We have to acknowledge that conservation measures over the past 30 years, limited in extent and late in coming as they were, have been a colossal failure. This has left us with serious challenges in meeting legally binding commitments on climate change, water quality and nature preservation. More important than that, it is a tragic loss of heritage that today we cannot show our children what a healthy bog looks like. It is a legacy for which few will thank us.

The national peatlands strategy was published in 2015 and set out to comprehensively map a path towards the wise management of all our peatland areas. It set out a path towards meeting conservation aims as well as the many other competing interests. In our view, it failed to deal in a meaningful way with existing forestry plantations or upland farming but the IWT was broadly supportive of the strategy. However, its implementation to date has been most disappointing. While authorities were quick to de-designate 46 NHAs which were identified in the 1970s as being nationally unique for their biodiversity value, we have yet to see even the list of proposed new NHAs that were supposed to replace them. We have seen no progress towards setting conservation objectives for blanket bogs and promised management plans have not materialised. The NPWS committed to finding a way of accommodating turf cutters while ensuring conservation objectives in these areas could be met but we are no wiser in 2019 as to how this can be achieved. Meanwhile, turf cutting and habitat loss continues.

The strategy committed-----