One in seven Irish households still burn peat for heat. New rules are aimed at discouraging a practice that many consider part of the culture.
By Ed O’Loughlin in the New York Times.
LULLYMORE, Ireland — For centuries, the Irish have used peat from bogs to fuel the home fires. Stories of families coming together to bring home “the turf,” as peat is called in Ireland, evoke idyllic memories of a poorer, but simpler, life on the land. But now the Irish government, in the name of fighting climate change, conserving habitat and improving air quality, is moving to restrict the use of peat — and finding that it is not easy.
Ireland has more than half the European Union’s remaining area of a type of peatland known as raised bog, one of the world’s rarest habitats and, scientists say, the most effective land form on earth for sequestering carbon.
“The bogs are our Amazon rainforest. They are where most of our carbon is stored,” said Éanna Ní Lamhna, a botanist and author.
Yet despite domestic and European laws that now ban the cutting of turf on many bogs, Ireland has so far proven unable, or unwilling, to stop people who insist on exercising what they see as their traditional right to cut turf.
Seamus Caulfield, a retired archaeology professor, cutting peat using a traditional angled spade called a sleán, on his family’s land in Belderrig, Ireland. Credit: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times.