Will the Midlands region become Ireland's rust belt?

A new TG4 documentary 'Gan Fód' tells the story of a changing Ireland and of our unique relationship with the bog. Set to air on Wednesday, February 5 at 9.30pm, the one-hour show asks what matters more people and jobs, or sustainability and the environment?

By 2027, Bord na Móna was due to cease peat harvesting, but with climate change on everyone’s mind and Ireland facing massive fines with carbon tax this has been brought forward to 2020. With a “just transition” leaving workers in limbo, what does this actually mean for the 1,500 employees that are left?

Set up in the 1930s, The Turf Development Board’s main aim was to generate fuel and electricity for our country, create employment and bring economic activity to rural Ireland. Since then, Bord na Móna and the ESB have been the backbone of the Midlands communities. Already 600 Bord na Móna employees have applied for voluntary redundancies. It’s expected that a significant amount of jobs will go in the coming months, most of these employees are men; their average age is over 50.

Being replaced with unmanned wind turbines, changing both the landscape and the economic future of the area indefinitely. But is this about more than loss of jobs? What is it about the bogs that we hold dear? Is it a way of life? The programme meets the people for whom these bogs provided not just an income but also helped form and connect communities, families and were a source of camaraderie.

“An lot of people don’t know about the bog…we know nothing else, we were brought up and reared on it…it’s all we had,” Mick Carey, loco driver with Bord na Móna says. Eamonn O’Hanlon, owner of the The Mona Bar in Daingean, talks about the knock-on effect that will be felt in towns and villages, schools and churches in the region.

With peatlands covering 1,200,000 hectares of our island, and 80,000 of that owned by Bord na Móna; the country is now faced with the single largest change of lands in modern Irish history. The programme will show how a bog rehabilitation programme works and why this work is vital and more importantly, why it needs to happen now. “You are going to see a massive transformation in the next few years as peat production comes to an end and these bogs become colonised again with plants and animals” – Mark Mc Corrie, Bord na Móna Ecologist.

Is there any room for people or community in Ireland’s decarbonisation plan? As the machines dig deep, so it seems the roots of the dispute run deep too. For the Midlands it is a waiting game.