Down in the bog, amid a field of black strips of turf stacked like Jenga sticks, Michael Fitzmaurice looks up defiantly at the plane snooping on his industry.
The aircraft is on the lookout for anyone still cutting, piling or collecting turf — an endeavor that the EU deems illegal.
“It’s some crack that we have a country in recession and virtually bankrupt, but the authorities can afford to put a plane in the sky to spy on turf cutters,” he said. “During the cutting season, we have had helicopters as well as planes, and we have had officials in vans scouting across the boglands to stop us doing what our ancestors did for centuries. And it’s all because they are afraid that the EU will fine Ireland if turf cutting continues.”
The EU has designated this springy, soggy piece of Irish earth a Special Area of Conservation and has ruled that no more turf cutting can take place there in order to preserve the bogs.
The Irish government is concerned that the EU will levy heavy fines on the republic for flouting environmental directives laid down 14 years ago.
However, Fitzmaurice, 43, who started turf cutting with his father when he was four, rejects the notion that his government has to adhere to Brussel’s environmental edict because Ireland owes so much to the EU.
“It wasn’t turf cutters and their families who bankrupted this country. It was the banks and the builders and their politician friends who got Ireland into such a mess,” he said. “We are not responsible for that, so why should we pay such a massive price just to do what Europe says.”
Ireland’s version of the National Trust, An Taisce, says, however, that the Fine Gael--Labour government must now enforce the ban.
Irish environmentalists point out that the bogs are unique and one of the most fragile and overworked natural habitats in the world.
“Bogs have a wider value to society if intact than the limited short-term economic gains of the minority vested interest of peat extractors,” an An Taisce spokesman said.
The environmental group said that the need to stop turf cutting was “10 years overdue.”
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