Offaly students capture top places in 'Love Your Wellies' competition

Every corner of every field, village and town in rural Ireland has a story that needs telling.

In the Love Your Wellies competition, students across the country gave a voice to those gems through embroidery, poetry, film, story-telling and visual arts.

Students from Offaly schools took the three top spots in the competition.

Before the competition, the FarmPEAT project hosted workshops with schools to show why the bogs and peat soils are so special.

These trips inspired them to raise awareness among their community through  their competition entries.

Lullymore Heritage & Discovery Park generously hosted the awards ceremony recently for the Love Your Wellies Competition 2023 as part of their 30th Anniversary  Celebrations.

In 1st Place, was Olivia Paczkowska from St. Colman's National School, Mucklagh with the embroidered t-shirt 'Tiola'.

In 2nd Place, was Ashley Coyle from Tullamore College with the game 'Bog Snap', and in 3rd Place, were Conor Monaghan, Noah McDermott, Ross Phillips and Conor McNeill from St. Colman's National School, Mucklagh with their comic 'Bog Busters'.

A huge well done to our local winners from St. Colman's, and to the rest of our finalists for their hard work and  creativity!

FarmPEAT is a project finding ways of managing agricultural land on peat for the benefit of climate, biodiversity, and water quality. To encourage this management change we offer results-based payments. This means a farm in good ecological condition will get a higher payment than a farm in poor ecological condition.

They work with a group of farmers whose lands surround 8 raised bogs across the midlands, which are some of Europe’s finest remaining raised bogs. Improving the quality of the transition zone around these bogs will help protect the raised bogs for generations to come.

The question is, why do we need to save raised bogs? Did you know that they store 13x more carbon per hectare than the Amazon rainforest? Yes, they are that effective! However, after years of draining water out of our bogs, most of Ireland’s raised bogs are now carbon sources, which means they are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than they are taking in.

We need to turn them back into carbon sinks or at least reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they are releasing. We can do this by slowing the flow of water (water is essentially the blood of the bogs) from the peat and making our bogs wet again. 

Farmers are on the frontline in the fight against climate change and as much as they try to do, they cannot do it alone. Every farmer is part of a community that can also help to  raise awareness.

A balance needs to be found so farmers can continue to do the great work they have done for so long, while also helping to store carbon in their peat soils.