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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— November - December
’ Fianna Fáil came to
power for the first time in , heralding an
age of darkness for Irish science. For all his
intellectual gifts – it was rumoured he was one
of the few men of the era who understood the
Theory of Relativity – Dev was no scientist.
He rewrote the educational system to give the
Irish language a place that many had dreamed
of for years. As there were only so many hours
in a school day, natural sciences fell off the
end of the bench. Ireland’s entrance to the
European Union in did bring with it rapid
changes in education. Environmental stud-
ies were introduced as secondary exam cer-
tificate subjects. Regional Technical Colleges
were established across the land. But as sci-
ence and wildlife expert, Éanna Ní Lamhna
has pointed out, anyone born before in
Ireland will have had no basic scientific edu-
cation. Ireland’s civil service of today is pop-
ulated by men and women who thus have no
grasp of the complex ecological requirements
of biodiversity.
The Boards of Ireland’s biggest land owners
– Coillte Teo and Bord na Móna - do not contain
a single environmental scientist. Nor does the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Coillte
appointed its first Director with a forestry qual-
ification in . Nature conservation issues
in Ireland have always been heavily politicised
Ireland’s environmental
mismanagement from forestry
to peat to wildlife protection
is only possible because the
authorities deride science.
t o n y l o w e s
Forests and bogs // Roads // Monbiot // Cork Harbour // Planning
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with farmers and landowners resisting any
moves to curb any practice or development
on the land that might damage biodiversity. A
Supreme Court judgment upheld the right
of landowners to be granted the opportunity to
object to designation of their lands. Ireland was
unique within the European Union in establish-
ing an Appeals System against the designation
process, even providing funding for landown-
ers to present their case.
De Valera’s shadow was nowhere greater
than in this designation of land for nature pro-
tection. The ministers to whom this responsibil-
ity devolved in were his descendants - Síle
de Valera and her junior minister responsible
for rural policy, her cousin, Eamon Ó Cuív.
Síle de Valera famously declared “Brussels,
Birmingham, the Burren; the same European
Union, different worlds”. ÓCuív urged a No vote
to the Nice Treaty in , citing “an inflexible
and unreasonable attitude towards implemen-
tation of certain policies’ by the EU”. The hen
harrier, a bird of prey hunted almost to extinc-
tion, became a symbol of the farmers’ anger. A
dead harrier was delivered to the offices of the
Kerryman Newspaper, a gesture that sent dis-
tasteful shudders down the backs of those ‘face-
less bureaucrats’ at their desks in Brussels.
At a meeting in Templeglantine, Co. Limerick
in of more than angry farmers, it was
claimed that the designation process would cost
€ million for each pair of birds protected. The
Irish Farmer’s Journal quoted a leading forestry
company representative at that meeting as say-
ing, “They must look at more than science and
must take into account social, economic and rec-
reational issues”. This conflicts with both the
legislation and the case law. , hectares
were dropped from the , hectares origi-
nally proposed for harrier designation, includ-
ing those areas closest to Coillte’s processing
plants. Minister Roche later called this, “a sig-
nificant consolidation”. Another consequence of
the Templeglantine meeting was Martin Cullen’s
disbanding of Dúchas, the Heritage Service -
what Michael Viney (author of the Irish Times
Another Life column) called, “that brave and
noble vision of the civil service”. Dispirited and
demoralised, a chastened Parks and Wildlife
Service became politicised, with any objec-
tions to developments requiring the individual
approval of the Minister himself.
The March joint press-release
from Environment Minister Dick Roche,
and Agriculture Minister Mary Coughlan,
announcing a ‘Protocol’ that would allow a
further , hectares of forestry in the des-
ignated areas, went so far as to refer to “young
forestry, both new and replanted, which the
recent research has shown to be a vital compo-
nent in the foraging pattern of the bird”. They
spoke of young forests’ “critical importance”
to the hen harrier. Critical indeed – their own
research service, COFORD, had attributed
the decline of the hen harrier to “the matu-
ration of the Irish forest plantation estate’”.
The universities, growing increasingly reli-
ant on industry funding, carefully cast their
research projects to protect industry. In the
case of the hen harrier, they sought to show
how much forestry could be planted before the
bird became extinct. The conclusions of their
study are flatly contradicted by international
peer reviewed scientific publications.
The death of science was nowhere more
clearly shown than in a letter issued by the
Director of the National Parks and Wildlife
on
th
January to all County Managers.
The Director told the Managers that, “with
regard to the hen harrier, the scientific advice
available to the Minister suggests that the
development of single rural dwellings does not
in general represent a threat to hen harrier or
its habitat”. This was in spite of the fact that
an internal email shows the Director knew
that there was already an “issue of one-off
housing having gone beyond acceptable levels
in particular sites”. This letter to all County
Managers concluded that as a consequence the
nature conservation designation should not
be used as grounds for refusing permission
for development of one-off houses within
the relevant proposed Special Protection
Area. There was no such scientific advice.
After an investigation by an environmental
organisation, Parks and Wildlife admitted that
the advice was of a “practical nature”.
When suggestions were made that the
planting of spruce, a non-native conifer, was
damaging Ireland’s native biodiversity, a
university provided research that appeared
to show that hardwoods were really no better
for biodiversity than conifers. However, they
compared the conifer spruce – which supports
seventy species of insects - to the broadleaf
ash -which supports sixty-eight species. Our
native oak, however, supports species of
“By 1997, there
had already been
a 92% loss of
raised bogs and
an 82% loss of
blanket bogs in
Ireland”
Forests and Bogs
Stripped bog
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— November - December
insects – critical for the birds which rely on this
food source. Forestry has been established on
sensitive peat soils at the headwaters of our most
unspoiled catchments. Up to kilos of rock
phosphate based fertilisers have been applied
to each hectare of some of these plantations,
plantations that when they are felled, release
deadly pulses of these nutrients – often for years
afterwards. A Parks and Wildlife internal email
reported being “stunned at a recent meeting with
Coillte and the Forest Service by the amounts of
fertiliser used to establish and maintain Sitka
Spruce crops on deep peat and the amounts
lost to adjacent aquatic systems”. It stated that
studies showed that the nutrients released are
“four orders of magnitude greater than the limits
set for eutrophication by the [Environmental
Protection Agency] EPA”. Another internal
memo reported that “we are sitting on fertiliser
timebombs (pardon pun) that are now coming
to the fore after + years of fertiliser usage for
forestry. Water lily leaves at the mouth of the
outlet stream at the head of the system were -
times larger than they should be! They are being
well fed there!”. This is the cause of the functional
extinction of the fresh water pearl mussel in
Ireland – and yet the felling and replanting of
forestry continues on these peat soils, in spite
of all the scientific evidence.
But the most astonishing travesty of sci-
ence has arisen over turf cutting. Across
Europe, natural peatlands have vanished.
The Netherlands and Poland have lost all
their peatlands. Switzerland and Germany
each have only hectares remaining. By
, there had already been a % loss of
raised bogs and an % loss of blanket bogs
in Ireland. Yet the Government claimed to
have ‘obtained’ derogations from the require-
ment to protect its raised bogs to allow
‘domestic’ turf cutting to continue. It actu-
ally awarded this to itself. In , Síle De
Valera declared that she was “conscious of
the social and economic impacts immediate
cessation would have on small communities”,
giving cutters “a period of up to ten years to
make new arrangements”.
As with the hen harrier, ‘social and eco-
nomic considerations’ may not be used to alter
science-based designations under EU legis-
lation and case law. But these ‘derogations’
have been extended, in spite of the fact that in
its Report to the European Commission
on the status of protected sites in Ireland, the
Department of the Environment admitted
that in the years – .% of our
remaining raised bog resource was lost. As
the astonishingly comprehensive Valverde
Report noted in , “Domestic turf cut-
ting now takes place at of the desig-
nated bogs. Turf cutting has broken the link
between the peat body and local topography,
climate and local hydrology”.
A comprehensive English study of the
impacts of peatland extractions reviewed one
Irish study that denied that a bog site stud-
ied acted as a reserve to absorb flooding. The
English author noted that the conclusion was
only possible because in fact the site was already
saturated in water. Thus science is ignored and
the officially sanctioned ‘domestic’ turf cutting
continues. The extent of commercial cutting
for export is entirely unquantified. Aside from
Bord na Móna’s works, not one local authority
has any record of turf cutting in its jurisdiction.
A recent test case on a hectare extraction
site in Westmeath has shown that the excep-
tions provided by the Statue of Limitations
and other planning loopholes mean that such
extraction is virtually impossible to control. The
Minister informed protestors that he was unable
to stop this extensive unauthorised industrial
peat extraction in Westmeath because he had
been advised by his Parks and Wildlife Service
that, “nothing in their files showed there was
any impact on the protected area”. In fact, the
Parks and Wildlife Service had commissioned
and held a report from its Ranger that told them
the extraction was adversely impacting on the
protected area.
Mícheál Martin led a trade delegation to
Mozambique and South Africa selling Irish
peat not only for horticulture but for industrial
clean-up operations. The Minister described
peat as an “environmentally friendly prod-
uct”. Worse yet, Bord na Móna, which controls
, hectares of peatlands, is above the law.
The Turf Act gives immunity to Bord na
Móna’s operations from the Local Government
(Water Pollution) Acts. The Minister is only
required to take measures to protect the envi-
ronment if taking “such precautions and making
such provisions will not cause substantial detri-
ment to the works or substantial hindrance to,
or substantial increase to the cost of, the works”.
The elephant in the room is the impact of the
release of dissolved organic compounds that
are produced when peatlands are drained – for
extraction, forestry, or ‘land reclamation’.
The ‘peaty colour’ that many observe in
rural water supplies comes from these dis-
solved organic compounds. They react with
chlorine in water treatment plants and pro-
duce trihalomethanes – cancer causing agents.
These trihalomethanes, once formed, require
a separate expensive treatment process to be
removed. If they are not removed, they can
cause bowel and intestinal cancers not just
through drinking, but even through prolonged
showering or bathing in such peaty water. The
Environmental Protection Agency reported
that trihalomethanes were the principle cause
of concern in fifty-one of Ireland’s public water
supplies in its most recent Quality of Drinking
Water Report. Yet they have done no research
that would allow them to establish the link
between the activities that cause this threat to
human health and the deadly results recorded
in their Reports. It’s another example of how
science is smothered simply by making sure
no enquiries are undertaken. State-sponsored
forestry and peat extraction are exposing res-
idents to these deadly trihalomethanes. The
local authorities must try to fund the expen-
sive processes required to remove them,
ignoring the polluter pays principle. And yet
recently a major Irish university has found
ways to recommend the planting of , hec-
tares of forestry on the peaty soils of cut away
bogs. The Long Fellow cast a long shadow.
“Bord na Móna, which controls 80,000
hectares of peatlands, is above the law...
The 1945 Turf Act gives immunity to Bord
na Móna’s operations from the Local
Government (Water Pollution) Acts”
Forests and Bogs
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