Ireland's Bogs

Perhaps the greatest, most damaging impact of climate change on Ireland’s landscape and vegetation could be the loss of most of our peat bogs, so much part of the island’s visual character, atmosphere and cultural history. A Mayo mountainside veiled in rain speaks for the role of soft but steady moisture in the rise of blanket bog as a russet cloak for the hills – a covering bound up with rural hearth and livelihood and yet a constant reminder of wild nature. In the midlands, too, the last bogs are islands surviving from another, wilder world.

Peatland scene
©Michael Viney

The very extremes of climate promised for parts of Ireland – both drought and deluge, in place of moderately cool summers and ‘soft’ days - threaten the survival of the last raised bogs and fens and large areas of blanket bog on the hills. Scientists’ models predict that up to 40% of the climate zones suitable for Irish peatlands will have gone by 2075, and that this loss will continue. By an irony, they hold the bulk of the island’s stored carbon, and their destruction will release even more CO₂ and methane (another powerful greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere.

On raised bogs, hotter, drier summers will speed decay of the peat, releasing more nutrients and promoting shrubs and grasses at the expense of sphagnum, sedges and other plants that are special to the surface of wet bog. As it changes to dry heath, birch, willow and Scots pine will invade, as is happening already on large areas of disused Bord na Mona ‘cutaway’ in County Offaly. The threats to upland blanket bogs will depend on where they are. In the east and south, drying out in summer will change the vegetation to heath and scrub, including the spread of highly inflammable gorse. In the west, where drier summers crack peatland open to bedrock, extreme rainfall will produce more landslides and bog-bursts. County Mayo has seen this already, the scars still raw on hillsides in north Mayo and on the flanks of the Sheeffry Mountains at Killary Harbour.