Qualla: 2003 Derrybrien Landslide

2003 Derrybrien Landslide: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Halloween, 2003. After weeks of unusually dry weather on the slopes of Cashlaundrumlahan, something gave way. Around turbine number 68 of the half-built Derrybrien wind farm, 450,000 cubic metres of peat began to move. The hillside, in a sense, decided to leave. What followed was not a sudden catastrophic crash but a slow-motion green disaster, a river of bog flowing downhill into the streams of County Galway and eventually reaching a lake twenty kilometres away. Nobody died at Derrybrien. The damage was not measured in lives but in fish, in drinking water, and in the credibility of a project meant to symbolise clean Irish energy.

2003 Derrybrien Landslide: When a Bog Walks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Blanket peat behaves strangely. It looks solid underfoot, but it is mostly water held in a sponge of half-decomposed plant matter, the slow accumulation of thousands of Irish summers and winters. Pile concrete bases for industrial wind turbines on top of such a thing and dry it o...

2003 Derrybrien Landslide: Twenty Kilometres of Trouble

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Peat in moving water does not behave like sediment. It clogs, it smothers, it strips oxygen from the river. The slick travelled twenty kilometres before reaching Lough Cutra, the lake that supplied drinking water to the townland of Gort. Taps in Gort ran with a strange colour for...

2003 Derrybrien Landslide: The Price of Going Green Wrong

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Derrybrien became shorthand in Irish environmental circles for a specific kind of mistake: the assumption that renewable infrastructure, because it is renewable, does not need the same scrutiny as everything else. Blanket peat is one of the largest natural carbon stores in Irelan...

2003 Derrybrien Landslide: What the Landscape Remembers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stand on the slopes of Cashlaundrumlahan now and the scar is harder to see than it once was. Heather has grown back over much of the disturbed peat. The river runs clear most days. The turbines, slim white columns against the grey-green of the Slieve Aughty Mountains, look as inn...