“On Oct. 31, new regulations designed to improve air quality will ban the sale of smoky fuels, including turf, a move that the government hopes will reduce public demand. But turf will remain freely available through informal channels, and rising fuel costs, due largely to the cutting of Russian gas supplies to Europe, have made peat even more attractive as a fuel source.
One in seven Irish families still rely, at least in part, on peat for heat. Luke Flanagan, an Irish member of the European Parliament, gathers his own turf from his family plot after a contractor cuts it with a machine. He says he can have a winter’s worth of turf cut for 500 euros: ‘I literally carry the bags on my back out of the bog.’
Although the trade is largely unregulated, turf cutting was widely reported to be at a high this summer as families and private contractors hurried to stockpile turf in advance of the October ban, which many had feared would be even stricter.
Michael Fitzmaurice, a member of Parliament and chairman of the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association, said that as global energy supplies tighten and prices soar, the use of peat is likely to increase this winter. Those who rely on turf for heating are often small farmers and poor or elderly people in rural areas. ‘With the war in Ukraine, fuel security has never been more important,’ Mr. Fitzmaurice said. ‘This is not the time to be pushing people into fuel poverty.’”
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