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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Cornufulla Bog in Roscommon?
Let us get out and about again to a bog where, once again, it would be helpful for government to provide everybody with a bit of direction on the best course of action. Cornufulla Bog in Roscommon. A thousand acres on the western bank of the Shannon, bordered on three sides by internationally protected wetlands and all within sight of Clonmacnoise.
Board Nimona and SSE Renewables think that the best thing to do is build a wind farm. On the face of it, a sensible use of the land. Locals argue that the bog's restoration value far outweighs its energy potential, both environmentally and culturally. They make good arguments as well. Who is to say who is right and who is wrong? Ideally, a land use strategy, as we've been hearing.
But in the absence of that, Ella McSweeney went to Cornufulla to hear what locals Amanda Ralph and Oliver Carney had to say.
So we're about eight kilometres from the centre of Loughan, but it's a very different landscape. We're here in the very south country of Scombe and Caernarfulla Bog is located on a bend on the River Shannon. So we have the Shannon Callows, which is the largest wetland in Western Europe, surrounds us here on three sides.
And then on the fourth side we have Caernarfulla Bog, which extends out for a few kilometres north of us.
And Cornifalla, it's such a lovely name to say. What does it mean?
So Cornifalla means the hill of blood. There was a battle here back centuries ago. There are seven townlands that actually feed into Cornifalla bog, as it's called. So one of them is Callowbeg. So Calla is flood meadow. So it's a small flood meadow. And to the left of me here, we're in the tiny townland of Cregan o Beaca.
So Cregan is rock or ridge and Beaca is a specific type of wailing or sobbing sound associated with grief. So families would have brought their loved ones across to Shannon to be buried by crossing the fords or by Shannon Cot in more recent times.
Close to us here is Calf Island in Chineley, which is the biggest red shank colony. And it has been protected by NPWS. They put a predator fence around it. And the calls, it's a very dense breeding ground for the red shank colony.
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Chapter 2: What arguments do locals make against the proposed wind farm?
Kernofulla School is a large national school at the very northern end of the bog. My daughter mentioned that they had a large flock of pooper swans migrating back to Iceland to fly over the school earlier this year and it sparked a conversation in the class about pooper swans, where they live, the difference with new swans. I feel like we're at a crossroads here.
We're either going to lose this bog forever and everything that goes with that, or we have the potential for that to be fast-tracked and brought back to what it would have been like back in the day.
But, of course, Borden and Mona would say it's not either or, it is and. They would say, look, we need green energy, we can put the wind turbines up and we can do nature restoration and we can do flood mitigation and it can still pull down carbon.
You know, you talk to any experts, I'm not an expert on bog hydrology, but the bog is a single living mass. If you start to divvy up parts of that bog and start putting in major roadway infrastructure, which is what will be needed here, you lose that potential in terms of carbon capture. So I disagree.
This is a bog that in 1987 Bordenamona started to harvest peat from.
Yeah, that's right. It was one of the last bogs of Bournemouth to start to harvest and it's also one of the ones that they took the least amount of peat from. When we surveyed and took some peat dabs on the private bog land we then decided to survey the entire bog so we took it into 230 separate grids and what we found is that the bog on average is 6 metres deep.
An acre 6 metre deep bog will store 50 times more carbon than an acre of forest. This is the amount of carbon that is on this bog
There are an awful lot of spider webs everywhere and moths coming up as we walk.
If you see that small kind of red suckler plant, that's a sundew. So a sundew is a carnivorous plant and it has sticky buds on the end.
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Chapter 3: How does the history of Cornufulla Bog influence its current value?
And it gets its nutrients by trapping insects. And it's a tiny little thing, but it's really interesting, the different kind of plants here.
It looks very sweet and very pretty, but it's kind of devilish, isn't it? Anything that's going to eat its prey like that. So what do you want to happen to this 1,000-acre bog, which is essentially owned by the public but managed by Board Nimona? We need clean energy, and it seems like a kind of good place to put it because it's connecting into the grid. It's a big open space.
There aren't loads of houses everywhere. In terms of the national interest, does that not make sense?
I don't agree, Ella. When Bournemouth stopped cutting peat here six years ago, they stopped maintaining the pumps on the bog, which were needed to keep the bog drained. Those pumps have been off for five years, which has allowed the likes of the otter, hooper swan, other protected mammals and bird life to come back onto the bog for the first time in decades.
Bournemouth have said they're going to turn those pumps back on. We're asking them not to do that. It's going to really damage the habitat of these important species. There's a bigger question here for the wider public. Llamac Noyes, we can just see the round towers in the distance there, we're on the opposite side of the bog.
Llamac Noyes was on the UNESCO tentative world heritage list for 13 years. The buffer zone for this UNESCO site encompassed the whole bog.
So we've gone from a position up until 2023 where the official policy of Ireland was to have a UNESCO site here, which would have meant that people would have had real problems building a shed, putting an extension on their house, to later in 2023 when it was removed from the list and Kern of Fuller Wind Farm, DAC, was set up by Bòrd na Món in SSE, to now being in a position where we're potentially going to have
wind turbines of up to 200 metres and beyond on this bog. So it just doesn't add up.
But Amanda, I mean, you don't want this wind turbine either, but the reality is, from a national interest point of view, we need green energy. So where are we going to get it from?
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