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You are > Home > Will the Government be caught on the hopper as turf cutting battle heats up?
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Will the Government be caught on the hopper as turf cutting battle heats up?
A LITTLE over a week ago, Boyle was chosen by RTÉ’s farming reporter Damien O’Reilly as one of his few stops on a national tour of Ireland’s farmlands, from where he reported live for the station’s Morning Ireland news programme.
One of the issues he brought to the RTÉ listenership was the threat to people’s right to cut turf for domestic use.
Castlerea man Paddy Concannon, known nationally as a champion of people’s right to cut turf, was interviewed during that broadcast.
Mr Concannon who is President of the Turf Cutters & Contractors Association (TCCA) voiced the anger of turf-saving families throughout Ireland.
The TCCA, with members from counties Offaly up to Leitrim, is preparing for the fight of its life and has fired the first salvo in what could turn out to be the kind of battle that could bring thousands of citizens out on the streets, and could yet cause major political upheaval.
The TCCA’s opening shots came in the form of a 40page submission to a governmentappointed group that is planning the termination of people’s right to extract turf from their family bogs.
The group, which has members from many counties, originates in the Roscommon and North Galway areas, and its members have put an immense amount of (voluntary) work into their submission, which includes a major study of several bogs in the Roscommon Herald readership area.
Now the TCCA is planning its next step, which is to inform the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the much feared bog evictions, and to inform them before the nation goes to the polls in the Yes/No referendum that takes place in about five weeks.
One such meeting takes place on August 31st in Ballaghadereen.
The TCCA says it has no option but to launch its campaign.
Dublin and Brussels are railroading huge change for turf-cutting households and there has already been heavy-handed treatment by the State of some turf-cutters this year with allegations that a contractor’s machinery was seized from a bog in Cavan.
Hundreds of people vented their anger at a public meeting on the issue earlier this month, and MEP Marian Harkin, who attended that meeting, was visibly surprised at the level of anger expressed. And now matters have taken a turn that will infuriate turf-saving households.
Excluded from the working group’s process from the start, TCCA members last week saw a document outlining the government’s plans on the issue.
This document has led the TCCA members to conclude that turf-cutting would eventually be declared a crime. And the reason? “Because we are a soft target,” Michael Fitzmaurice of the TCCA said.
As Ireland exports tonnes of peat for gardens around Europe, and practices industrial denuding of huge swathes of bogs for electricity, the turf-saving family is being told that taking a relatively tiny amount of peat annually, for home heat, will end.
So, turf-saving households have been left out of a process that, if carried through, could end up costing the average rural household thousands of Euro per year in heating alternatives.
Michael Fitzmaurice and other members of TCCA such as Síle O’Connor and Tom Ward, are justifiably wary of these informal promises made to turf-saving households: “Livelihoods are at stake, and it isn’t right for them to say to Brussels, ‘yes, Brussels, we will protect peatland by ending this tradition’, and then turn to rural Ireland and say ‘not to worry, keep cutting turf”.
The TCCA is demanding a root-and-branch review of the flawed process that led to this folly. The Government’s facts and figures are wrong, it says, and the whole issue has now been complicated by the loud intervention of environmental organisations, whose agenda, TCCA argues, is well intentioned but is not based on reality.
“No-one is in a better position than us to protect these managed landscapes,” Mr Fitzmaurice said, adding that persistent efforts by his group to meet with the powers-thatbe and work out a realistic way forward, have been ignored.
“No one cares more about Ireland’s bogs than the families and individuals that have been the custodians of the bogs for generations.
“We don’t disturb the surface of the bog, we take small amounts of what’s under it, and we do so with minimal impact, with an efficiency that no other fuel production process could boast. For 95% of the year, our bogs are havens for wildlife and even when we save our turf during a few days annually, the footprint is tiny. The people who say otherwise need to get real.”
Tired of being characterised as destroyers of bogs, the growing union of turf-saving family households is now saying ‘Enough is Enough’: stop the uninformed vilification of turf-savers and start a dialogue that will lead to a mutually acceptable and realistic arrangement.
The gloves are now off: the TCCA has up until now been focussed on its objectives and hasn’t sought to link this issue with European Union politics, but the discovery last week that the Government is effectively planning to run turf-cutters from bogs as criminals has forced the hand of the TCCA.
The meeting in Ballaghadereen next Monday, August 31st, is organised by a proNO group, that has invited the TCCA to present its case.
Elements of the IFA are also throwing shapes in the NO direction. Caught on the hop in the first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, could it be that the Government will this time around be caught on the hopper?
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