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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
48 October-November
Bogged off
Peatlands make up just 3% of the earth’s surface but
store 25% of the world’s total carbon, more than all the
forests – where 80% of the carbon is in soil, not trees
By Tony Lowes
J
ust as they have been destroyed we
are realising the value of bogs.
Globally, peatlands make up just
3% of the earth’s surface but store
about 25% of the world’s total
carbon — more than all the carbon stored in
the biomass of the world’s forests, including
tropical rainforests.
In Ireland, the word mire [boglach] refers to
our wet, peaty boglands: landscapes dating
back 10,000 years that serve as natural
carbon stores, wildlife refuges, and cultural
icons. Once upon a time, Ireland possessed
Europe’s most significant carbon sinks – vast
waterlogged peatlands that quietly locked
away millennia of atmospheric carbon
beneath their spongey surfaces. This was our
legacy from glacial retreat and persistent rain,
giving rise to the raised and blanket bogs that
served as alveoli for Europe’s green lungs for
aeons.
Peatlands here cover about 21% of the land
but store over 50% of the nation’s total soil
carbon stock. Shockingly, they represent the
highest per-hectare sources of soil carbon
loss in the EU. Specifically, degraded Irish
peatlands emit around 21.5 million tonnes of
CO₂ annually, approximately equal to our
entire agricultural sector’s emissions of
18–22 million tonnes CO₂ equivalent per year.
Ireland has the highest
per-hectare sources of soil
carbon loss in the EU
Dried-out bogs and wetlands
Peat extraction, infrastructure engineering
works, river diversion, canal construction,
large-scale drainage for agriculture,
building, and flood control (‘draining the
Shannon’) have all transformed vast areas of
bog and wetland into drier land. This process
lowers the water table, dries out peat, and
leads to the oxidation and shrinkage of the
peat mass, emitting the stored carbon.
‘Another Level of Designations’
The new EU Nature Restoration Law will
require Member States to restore at least
30% of degraded peatlands — about 25,000
hectares — in agricultural use by 2030, with
greater targets by 2040 and 2050. ‘Restoring’
(aka ‘rewetting’) means raising the water
table, often still allowing for seasonal use of
the ground. But about 335,000 hectares of
Irish degraded peatlands have been
‘restored’ and are now under grassland.
While the figures for actual drained grassland
peat areas are disputed, these grasslands
alone may be responsible for 14–16% of
Ireland’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Recognising sensitivities among rural
landowners, the previous Minister of State
for Heritage, Malcolm Noonan, explicitly
stated that the State would prioritise its own
lands in achieving EU targets, emphasising
no compulsory land acquisitions. Plans for
rewetting of managed lands will rely on
commitments from Bord na Móna (90,000
hectares) and Coillte (30,000 hectares).
In spite of litigation that finally closed all
industrial peat extraction and repurposed
Bord na Móna after 2019, the failure to
protect 55 blanket-bog areas as well as a
host of raised bogs – or even to prevent
ongoing damage – has led this year to the
steps of the EU Court of Justice (again),
making this one of the EU’s longest-running
infringement proceedings.
Open resistance
Despite legal obligations, political resistance
remains intense, with continued industrial
extraction and a brisk turf trade in places like
Mayo this summer. The EPA is investigating
38 large-scale (more than 50-hectare)
industrial-extraction sites, contributing to a
recorded export trade of 300,000 tonnes of
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog,
— Seamus Heaney, Digging (1966)
ENVIRONMENT
October-November 49
Ireland’s Forestry Standards are 30 cm depth
and 20% organic content. The Minister
argues this is for “consistency” with older
maps used for greenhouse gas inventory.
Adopting the new 10 cm standard would
increase the area of Irish peatlands protected
under GAEC 2 by 13% — or 190,000 hectares.
That is the real reason.
Overshooting the climate
targets
Ireland’s carbon sinks have become more
critical than ever after the EPA’s June 2025
Ireland’s Greenhouse Gas Projections
estimated that Ireland would consistently
overshoot its climate targets. Even with
‘additional measures’, Ireland is projected to
achieve only a 22.9% reduction compared to
2018 levels by 2030. This is less than half of
the national target of a 51% reduction
mandated by the Climate Action and Low
Carbon Development (Amendment) Act
2021. Agriculture, the top-emitting sector
with 37.8% of total emissions, is projected
to see only a 16% emissions reduction by
2030.
Meanwhile, without additional measures,
the overall land-use emissions (known as
LULUCF — Land Use, Land Use Change, and
Forestry), currently at 9.3% of national
emissions, are projected by the EPA to
increase by 95% compared to 2018.
Heaney’s warning
Deaths from heat waves, flooding, sea-
level rises, and storms are not just the result
of our ever-increasing emissions. They also
derive from our failure to ensure that the
greenhouse gases stored in our rain-washed
soils stay there.
Maybe we should leave the end to Heaney
(Seamus Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, 1974):
“The bog [is] the memory of the landscape”.
If so, cutting it in the era of climate change is
the ultimate act of agricultural forgetting.
Tony Lowes is Director of Friends of the Irish
Environment
peat annually, valued at almost €40 million.
Few prosecutions have taken place, and sites
under 50 hectares must be processed
through local authority enforcement units,
well known for their lack of will – and
resources.
Turf contractor and Roscommon TD
Michael Fitzmaurice continues to echo
populist defiance: if Brussels “comes
heavy”, he’d “pull the shutters down… The
EU can decide if they want to work together
as a community or do they want to push
everyone back into the trenches like we had
ten or eleven years ago”.
The Deputy refers to June 2012 when turf
cutters, including two men from Roscommon
and Galway, were charged and brought
before Galway Circuit Criminal Court. The
case collapsed on 2 November 2022 when
the State decided not to prosecute due to
prolonged delays and legal uncertainties
about the transposition of the EU Habitats
Directive into Irish law. “There is no longer a
prosecution against you and you are free to
go”, the judge told both men, to the public
jubilation of rural Ireland.
The Cessation of Turf Cutting
Compensation Scheme oered an index-
linked 15-year payment of €1,500 annually.
Up to now, €65.5 million has been paid to
3,435 turf cutters from 130 designated bogs.
Forestry’s false promise
While 6% of Ireland’s peatland habitat loss
is due to drainage and conversion to
improved grasslands, 19% has been lost to
forestry — and not with positive results for
the climate. Around 137,000 hectares of
deep peat soils have been aorested, much
of it before current restrictions. Forestry is
critical because 80% of the carbon in forests
is in the soil, not the tree itself. Opening the
soil to plant trees releases carbon stored for
millennia, accelerating global warming.
Mandatory successive replanting every 30
years further exacerbates soil carbon loss —
and perpetuates the environmentally
damaging Irish single-species clear-fell
model, notwithstanding ‘biodiversity areas’.
Driven by accelerated harvest cycles,
insucient new planting, and increased
climate-driven forest damage, the EPA
recently revealed that in 2023 Ireland’s
forest estate became a growing source of
carbon emissions, no longer a sink.
Yet Junior Minister Michael Healy-Rae calls
for more afforestation on peatlands,
demonstrating a chilling concurrence with
Trump’s view of science: “Science will be
used to prove that shallower peaty or mineral
soils are very suitable to plant trees on. Like
I say, I’m going to win that argument on
science, because we’re working on it in the
Department”.
The Irish Natura and Hill Farmers
Association [INHFA] has called for
aorestation on reclaimed grasslands to end
the “vicious circle of anti-community, anti-
environment, and anti-farmer policy”.
The current forestry programme was
delayed not by the normal Agricultural
Directorate rows but by DG Clima [the EU
Directorate General for Climate Action]
forcing Ireland to increase the protection of
peaty soils from forestry by lowering the
depth of peat that must be protected from 50
cm to 30 cm.
However, the United Nations Global
Peatlands Assessment 2023 calls for
protection of even 10 cm depth of peaty soils
– the size of a mobile phone. The traditional
30–50 cm threshold was based on
agricultural criteria (e.g., plough depth). The
new assessment emphasises peat’s
“enormous carbon density”.
Minister rejects new science
Agriculture Minister Martin Heydon has now
rejected the new Irish Peat Soil Map’s use for
the implementation of GAEC 2 [the ‘Good
Agricultural and Environmental Conditions’
required for grants], echoing Healy-Rae:
“The subject of planting forests on peat soils
is not black and white”. Only it is.
The new Irish Peat Soil Map adopts the UN
recommendation and defines the depth to be
protected at 10 cm even if it is as little as
8.6% of the organic content of the soil.
Degraded Irish peatlands
emit around 21.5 million
tonnes of CO₂ annually,
approximately equal to
the entire agricultural
sector’s emissions of
18–22 million tonnes CO₂
equivalent per year
Cmpigners from Sve Leitrim pull up Sitk
spruce splings from Coillte petlnd
