LISTEN: How an Offaly farm is reshaping the future of boglands

On day four of their Hidden Heartlands series, Irish Stew cohosts John Lee and Martin Nutty visit Donie Regan’s farm in Shinrone to report on the Peatlands for Prosperity programme. Under Douglas McMillan’s leadership, the cooperative is rewetting degraded bogs and trialling paludiculture crops from cranberries to reeds to generate carbon revenues, revive biodiversity, and create rural opportunities.

The poet Seamus Heaney once said, "I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself." That territory is 14 to 21 percent bog.

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So, on their fourth day, “Off the Beaten Craic in the Hidden Heartlands,” Irish Stew podcast cohosts, John Lee and Martin Nutty, head to Shinrone, in Offaly, near the Tipperary border to the farm of Donie Regan, a demonstration site for Peatlands for Prosperity, the brainchild of Douglas McMillan and his Green Restoration Ireland Cooperative team.

Doug explains how centuries of peat extraction left expanses of degraded bogland, often dismissed as wastelands. But they’re fields of dreams for Doug, who outlines how rewetting bogs halts carbon loss, restores biodiversity, and opens the door to wet farming techniques known as paludiculture.

Using Donie’s farm as a showroom for how paludiculture can restore economic value to bog land, Peatlands for Prosperity is testing potential hydrophilic cash crops such as bog berries, cranberries, even lettuce and celery, as well as common wetland plants like bullrushes and common reeds, which can be renewable sources of building and packaging materials. Both believe wetland agriculture can offer farmers meaningful new income streams from both these kinds of crops and from earning carbon credits for maintaining carbon-sequestering bogs.

The conversation probes the challenges of farmer hesitancy, policy confusion, cultural ties to turf cutting, and how the demonstration site helps other farmers see the program’s potential.

Donie speaks passionately about witnessing wildlife return to his land, and the team discusses educational outreach, including bringing schoolchildren onto the bog to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards, the ecotourism possibilities of restored boglands, and how transforming Ireland’s peatlands could be a win-win for climate, biodiversity, farmers, and rural communities alike.

But let’s give Seamus Heaney the last word from his poem Bogland:

"Our unfenced country
 Is bog that keeps crusting
 Between the sights of the sun."

Next week Irish Stew reports from Birr Castle with a focus on the groundbreaking science done there, exemplified by the world’s largest telescope for 72 years, the mighty Leviathan of Parsonstown.

For more information on Green Restoration Ireland visit GreenRestorationIreland.coop. 

For more on the Irish Stew Podcast visit IrishStewPodcast.com.