Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The proposed deal between Coillte, the State forestry company, and Gresham House, a UK-based investment fund, is an absolute disgrace on a par with the previous, utterly shameful plan first signed off by Fianna Fáil and the Greens in 2010, and followed through on by the Fine Gael-Labour Government, to sell off the harvesting rights of Coillte in 2013 to pay off the bankers' debts. I am thankful that shameful proposal was defeated through mass protests but now we essentially have a continuation of that attempt by the State and by the State forestry company to facilitate a corporate takeover of tens of thousands of acres of land and forestry to benefit a for-profit investment fund. The questions and answers produced by Coillte on this spell it out clearly. It states:

The [Irish strategic forestry] fund is designed to generate profits from the business of forestry and timber production. These profits will be retained within the fund and from time to time be distributed to the investors in a similar way as a company distributes dividends to its shareholders.

That is what this is about. It is a corporate grab of land and forestry at the expense of small farmers, biodiversity and water quality. It is absolute nonsense to suggest any of this is going to benefit the climate. As Friends of the Irish Environment pointed out when it wrote to the European Commission, a report done for the Department showed Irish forests, because they are being cut down and are based on a monocultural industrial model, are net carbon emitters because we have a totally dysfunctional for-profit forestry model. We need to reform Coillte, abandon this deal and adopt a sustainable forestry model.

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