This is how Kevin Mahon, the managing director of the Irish branch of horticultural peat giant Klasmann-Deilmann, described the importation of around 4,000 tonnes of peat last September from Latvia to the company’s processing plant in Rathowen in Westmeath.
Following the ruling, any large-scale peat company that wishes to operate within legal parameters must go through a multi-stage process to gain retrospective planning permission from An Bord Pleanála, followed by new planning permission to a local authority and then licensing from the Environmental Protection Agency .
One important factor that failed to surface in debate is the fact that the EPA is investigating the activities of a dozen peat extractors for operating without a licence on lands where the agency suspects that large-scale extraction is taking place. This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu as part of a cross-border project with TVNET in Latvia. As part of our PEAT’S SAKE series, we have also examined the peat trade and cutting on protected bogs. You can read these articles here.
From 20 years of analysing satellite imagery of Irish peatlands, Dr Connolly is expecting some big figures to emerge from the research. While the State was encouraging the expansion of the industry, there was much less effort assigned to ensuring that the industry was strictly regulated, operating without planning permission or, with the exception of Bord na Móna, licences from the EPA.
Harte Peat, in its own words, is “one of the market leaders” in supplying peat to the global mushroom industry, exporting to five continents, making Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan’s ruling the highest profile case to come down against a large peat player in Ireland to date. The case is currently before the Court of Appeals.
The company has its own operation on the Westmeath-Longford border that had post-tax profits of over €525,000 in 2020 following a turnover of €15.5 million. The company owns a key peat processing plant in Ireland, and according to the EPA, also leases or has access to “significant tracts of peatland” in Tipperary.
Site inspection reports – released to Noteworthy under Access to Information on the Environment Regulations – show that “significant peat extraction” was discovered during the first inspection on 19 August 2020 at a bog near Aghnavealoge in Longford “where the peat was being dug up by excavator” and stacked for drying.
During an inspection in April 2021 at peatlands in Derrydooan and Newpass, the EPA noted large stockpiles of milled peat, with some peat removed by a digger and placed into lorries for transport to its processing plant nearby in Rathowen. In the letter, the EPA said that, despite informing the company on 22 October 2020 that it was in breach of the EPA Act, “the Agency believes that KDIL [Klasmann-Deilmann Ireland Ltd] has continued its extraction activities on some or all of the aforementioned areas….. and has, it appears, even escalated the intensity of these activities in recent times”.
At the end of May, the EPA confirmed to our team that it had carried out five further inspections of the company’s bogs in 2022 and “recently became aware of some activity on one of the bogs” subject to previous inspections. The agency said it is currently investigating but “cannot comment further on the matter at this time”.