| dc.description.abstract | In January 2021, Bord na Móna chief executive Tom Donnellan announced that the company had ended its peat production business. The closure of the industrial bogs has led to calls for a just transition for those affected. Just transition is the trade union movement¿s contribution to the environmental debate. As the world moves its reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy, workers employed in extractive industries face the challenge of job loss. A just transition ensures that `no one is left behind¿, while fully accepting that there are `no jobs on a dead planet¿.
This thesis is primarily concerned with Bord na Móna, the semi-state company responsible for the industrial extraction of peat from Irish bogs. It aims to critically examine geographic literatures pertaining to human/nature interactions and collect data from informed stakeholders concerning the changes in the peat industry through time. It also seeks to understand the role of the state in managing peat-for-energy transitions, and in so doing, identified the troubled turbary bogs to Special Areas of conservation conflict that arose following Ireland¿s adoption of the Habitats Directive in 1997. Lessons can be learned from prior transition when considering contemporary job loss from the bogs.
Using a qualitative, semi-structured interview approach, collected evidence suggests that instead of a sudden end, the Irish peat-for-energy sector has been in a long decline. Following its establishment in 1946, Bord na Móna evolved through three distinct phases until the mid-1980s where it found itself overstretched, indebted and outcompeted. 4,400 full-time and seasonal jobs were shed by 1992 with consequences for the wider midlands economy. Between 1993 and 2004, two briquette factories and five peat-fired power stations closed. Three new, albeit more efficient, peat-fired power stations were opened. In October 2018, 430 Bord na Móna employees were made redundant.
This research discovered that as Bord na Móna declined through time it has also been transitioning. Since the 1950s, efforts to repurpose cutaway bogs into productive landscapes have been underway. Numerous issues arose with each effort. Livestock were nutrient-deficient, grasslands expensive to convert and forestry unproductive. Use of cutaway for amenity and biodiversity provision have proven more successful, albeit at significant cost. As part of its new brown to green approach, Bord na Móna has invested in wind energy. However, the installation of wind turbines in bogland is controversial as it can lead to further environmental degradation.
The key findings from this research are as follows. As its bogs became increasingly cutaway, Bord na Móna has been slowing down and transitioning simultaneously: a dialectic of unstable progress through time. The company once had a social remit to employ people in an otherwise underdeveloped region of Ireland: its midlands. This changed in the 1980s when the company found itself in financial crisis. New working relations have emerged in recent years. Seasonal employees were oftentimes students who sought work during summer holidays to fund their third level education and farmers who sought to supplement their income. In time this model changed, with workers left in a precarious position. It is now a growth-orientated company which aims to return a profit to the exchequer. Communities developed alongside the peat industry and as it declined so did local business. Moreover, there are no quick-fix solutions to job loss in the Irish midlands. Bord na Móna has paid for workers to be retrained and even offered new jobs to former employees who had previously been made redundant. However, these roles are lower pay and/or temporary. Transition efforts have failed to replace the employment that once existed in the bogs, power stations and briquette factories. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all approach for utilising post-industrial bogland is not possible due to their variable geography.
A number of gaps in geographic literature have been identified during this study. The research contributes to just transition literature in new ways. First, it contributes a study of peat into a body of work dominated by coal. Second, it provides an account of just transition in Ireland, which has been understudied to date. Third, it contributes to human geography debates around people/nature interactions, arguing that the bogs of Ireland have been produced in a myriad of ways through labour. Fourth, it contributes empirical data concerning the role of the state to political ecology discussions around power, control and marginalisation. | en |
