Ireland has a large area of peat, rich wetland environmentalists have been opposed to coal mining in wetland areas Their argument is that mining peat can damage the ecological balance of Ireland's wetlands, with immediate and serious consequences for polluting water sources  However, this fear is untenable
In the last 50 years of statistics, there have never been any reports of contaminated water sources due to coal mining
In Ireland, the ecological environment of coal mining wetlands is not substantially different from that before mining