Turf Cutting Ban

TY LEGAL STUDIES 2011-2012

EU Regulation

• EU conservation regulations • Ireland faces huge fines from the EU

commission if turf cutting continues• regulations come into effect next March 2012

EU DIRECTIVE

• TURF will no longer be cut on 54 EU designated habitat sites since May 2010

• to conserve precious wildlife habitats • Cutting turf on 31 raised bogs has already

been banned by the EU and the ban is due to be extended to 24 more by the end of the year.

Enforcement

• Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan said enforcement action would be taken where turf cutting on protected raised bogs continued.

• Punishment - jail• Compensation – Cutters have to take a

compensation package (€1500 PA) on offer for the next 15 years or relocate to another bog.

Economics

• Concerned Galway farmers are highlighting the importance of turf-cutting as a source of income and as a domestic fuel.

Emotion• “Generations of people have been cutting turf on these bogs. It’s

part of life for a large number of families, especially the older generation, to cut turf, to save it, to draw it home. It’s therapeutic. It’s just part of their culture,”

• “They love to have their own reek of turf or shed of turf, [it] gives them security for the winter, and also they get tremendous therapeutic value in saving that turf. So it’s part of a ritual, it’s part of a culture, that has been passed on from generation to generation.

• “So people don’t want to end that tradition. They want to continue cutting their turf. And people have enormous connection with their own bank of turf or their own plot of bog because maybe they would see in the past that [it] was hard won by their forefathers; they probably got it maybe in a division through the Land Commission in the past.

Twist

• IN an ironic twist to the ongoing controversy over an EU ban on turf-cutting on Moanveanlagh bog near Listowel, it now appears the law that aims to protect plant and animal life, would result in a prettly little butterfly being wiped out on the bog.

• The Marsh Fritillary (Eurodryas aurinia) butterfly lives on the edge of the bog around areas of newlycut turf. It requires the lightly vegetated cut-off margin of the bog, where the plant on which it breeds grows. However, if the ban is implemented in full the butterfly will die out because it will not be able to live in the heavy scrub that will take over along the Moanveanlagh margins, according to one of the county's leading insect experts.