Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Bill and the debate around it highlight everything that is wrong with this and previous Governments' attitude to all environmental issues, their contempt and disregard for our natural heritage, their weasel words and pretence of concern, and their attempts to con us into believing that they are taking action when they are doing the opposite. The Bill also highlights the problem with how the environmental movement itself deals with issues that involve a conflict between ordinary people and environmental concerns.

The Bill's explanatory memorandum reads:

Section 18A(6) clarifies that amendment or revocation of a natural heritage area order means that the land in question (or the part of the land in question) ceases to be designated as a natural heritage area and restrictions relating to a natural heritage area, arising from section 19(2) of the Wildlife (Amendment) Act 2000, are fully removed.

We have been told by the Minister and her press office that the Bill and the review from which it came were designed to see how Ireland could "more effectively achieve conservation of threatened raised bog habitat through focused protection and restoration of a reconfigured network". They also told us: "This will entail the phasing out by 1 January 2017 of turf cutting on 36 [sites] ... the complete de-designation of 46 natural heritage [sites] where ... restoration would be prohibitively expensive for the conservation benefits achieved." I applaud the Orwellian language of "reconfiguring the network" but, to paraphrase a certain US army general, we are destroying the village in order to save it. Let us get this straight - in order to save our raised bogs, which are in areas that we designated as NHAs, we are going to de-designate them, remove whatever protection NHA status afforded them and allow further commercial and other forms of turf cutting. We are legislating in order to speed up the destruction of raised bog habitats and dressing that fact up as a reconfigured attempt to save them. Under all of the spin and nonsense is a gem of truth: we are doing this because restoration would be "prohibitively expensive".

The Minister has assured us that this de-designation will not matter because, in order to compensate for the loss of habitat within these sites, 25 undesignated raised bogs in public ownership or where there is reduced turf cutting pressure will be newly designated as NHAs. What confidence can we have in any environmental commitment from the Government, given its record and the wider record of the State in dealing with this and related issues?

The last report of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, on the state of our raised bogs in 2013 found that no site was in good conservation status. Raised bogs specifically were given a bad status because of a decrease in their range, habitat, structure, function and area. Past attempts by the State to safeguard raised bogs have failed miserably. Their health, extent and survival have diminished despite the NHA status afforded them. Now it is proposed with a straight face that de-designating them will save them. This farce is incredible and insulting. As noted in the report, the active raised bog area in the whole country is less than 4,000 hectares as a result of Government failures. The Minister assures us that the Bill will protect 290 hectares of active raised bog.

As noted by the Irish Wildlife Trust, if the Government was serious about the issue, it would recognise that:

[The] value of peatlands in adapting or mitigating climate change cannot be understated, in addition to the benefits they provide in mitigating flooding and protecting water quality. It would be far more progressive and proactive to designate the additional sites while enforcing conservation of existing NHAs and SACs.

The uniqueness of the raised bog as a habitat and a natural sink for storing and sequestrating carbon is well known. Peatlands absorb 57,000 tonnes of carbon every year and store more than 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon. Conversely, more than 4 million cubic tonnes of carbon are released from burning peatlands every year. I note with sadness the facts to which others have alluded, for example, that more than 93% of our natural heritage is gone forever. Not at the hands of individual turf cutters, but as a State policy via Bord na Móna and the ESB, with the increased commercial use of peat in gardening and so forth and as a consequence of mechanised turf cutting and commercialisation.

Even as late as 2009 and 2010, Bord na Móna extracted 1.8 million cu. m. of peat for horticultural purposes, 90% of which we exported abroad. This is neither sustainable nor necessary and should be stopped. The resources devoted to this extraction should be funnelled into preservation and conservation and those working there could be redeployed into sustainable jobs managing and extending these vital habitats.

Peat is used to produce 13% plus of our electricity and, scandalously, we are extending the use of peat-fired power plants despite our pathetic failure to reach existing targets for reducing carbon dioxide. Not only are we failing to reach these targets but the continued commercial use of our bogs will ensure an essential part in storing carbon will be destroyed in future. Instead of dealing with this, the elephant in the room, we are content on one hand to demonise ordinary rural dwellers who use small amounts of peat while simultaneously, in this Bill, de-designating natural heritage areas, NHAs, and refusing on costs grounds to allocate the resources necessary to deal with the preservation of this habitat. It is possible to conserve bogs with small-scale local use, and some of the better preserved bogs have been preserved because their small-scale usage acted to ward off the possibility of more mechanised use for afforestation and so on. I note with interest that the previous Deputy spoke at length about the Abbeyleix bog as an example of what can be done.

The question is why have we failed our environment so miserably and why this has often been presented as a conflict between environmentalist and ordinary rural dwellers seeking no more than the use of a resource used for generations to heat their homes. I am not the kind of environmentalist who cares nothing about rural people and only about rural people. I want to preserve our unique environment but believe that can be done in a way that brings the skills and knowledge of turf cutters and many in rural communities into the campaign to preserve this habitat. Any environmental protection measure that sets out in opposition to the needs of ordinary people and which often portrays them as the cause of environmental damage is bound to fail and, worse, lose the very people who are both needed in such campaigns and who should be at the forefront of such a campaign. Any environmental campaign that ignores the fact that many turf cutters come from areas of severe disadvantage, where access to fuel is an essential way of making ends meet, will not only alienate those who rely on turf for fuel but will fail at its chief goal of protecting the bogs.

Let us look at the demonisation of turf cutters in this debate and the attempted imposition of laws to stop them accessing fuel and a resource they previously and traditionally had access to. Why did we not, before designating areas as NHAs or as conservation sites, go to these communities and enlist them in the campaign for preserving these bogs? Over the past decades, the attempts to stop people harvesting turf in NHA sites have been marked by incompetence, hypocrisy and brutality. There was incompetence because a severely under-resourced National Parks and Wildlife Service did not try at the outset to win people over to the need to preserve these areas. There was hypocrisy because the levels of compensation offered were a fraction of the loss people would suffer and people would not be fooled by that. No real resources were invested in these areas and no real attempt was made to win people over or to see the potential of turf cutters and people in these areas as possible stewards who could play a vital role in restoring the health of these bogs.

If we were serious about these habitats, we should have offered free heating and energy to those affected. In a decade in which fuel and energy bills of ordinary people have rocketed, we told many rural people they could not access their own form of energy . We expected them to accept this. We should have offered jobs and opportunities in the conservation of our environment and the production of renewable energy by local co-ops. We proposed a measure in the recently passed energy Bill that would have given small-scale, local co-operative producers of renewable energy access to the national grid, but it was opposed and defeated by the Government. We could have looked at using the more than 500,000 acres of public land in Coillte's hands that cannot be used sustainably for forestry and seen how we could use them with local communities affected by NHA sites. We could have, inventively and with proper resourcing, won allies in local communities in the fight to preserve our environment and raised bogs. We could have funded local co-ops in forming renewable energy hubs and sustainable land management practices. We could have done this with the same vigour and largesse with which we throw tax incentives at multinationals and corporations. Instead we understaff and under-resource the National Parks and Wildlife Service, we offer derisory compensation to turf cutters and we pretend that individual turf cutting is the reason for the destruction of our bog habitats instead of the greater commercial exploitation of bogs overseen by vested interests.

Unfortunately, many in this debate play into the idea that the divide in this and other environmental issues is between an enlightened environmentalist lobby and a rapacious, greedy local bunch of gombeens. That is a huge mistake. With proper resourcing, rural dwellers can be advocates and defenders of these types of habitats and they can be the front line in preserving our unique environment. As long as we offer no real alternative to them, however, bar to tell them to stop using this resource and take the financial hit for the rest of us, we will never convince them or ever really win allies in these environmental battles. We oppose the de-designation of the NHA sites, and as the record of this and previous Governments suggests, this is not an attempt to preserve our heritage but to facilitate its destruction, as I have stated.

I want to end by emphasising that I believe this destruction is not at the hands of individual turf cutters but at the hands of State-sponsored bodies for commercial and industrial extraction. It could have been a sign that we are serious about our raised bogs if we had kept the existing NHAs and added to them while addressing the genuine concerns of local people and turf cutters. If we did that while switching from peat use in electricity generation and in horticulture, we could take the Government seriously. Instead we have another shameful chapter in the environmental record of this and previous Governments.

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