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

I want to clarify that some of the questions I am asking about Coillte come from the perspective of utterly opposing the sale. The witnesses and others outlined some of the problems. Whatever difficulties there are, they will be made worse if we sell off the harvesting rights of Coillte. The point I am trying to get at is that some of the underperformance of Coillte is related to the fact that it has been preparing for privatisation for some time and has had a commercial focus which is not necessarily at one with the best interests of the forestry sector in Ireland as a whole, from the point of view of the sawmilling sector, public access, planting or whatever. It has a commercial mandate. That would seem to be borne out. The witnesses did not really answer the question; maybe they do not know the answer. Why did they sell off 40,000 hectares?

As I acquainted myself with this issue over the past while, I was shocked that a country that can grow trees twice as fast as any in Europe has the lowest level of forest cover anywhere in Europe. That is an extraordinary indictment of the failure of forestry policy. I stress that I do not blame this on ordinary Coillte workers, who do fantastic work. I pay tribute to the staff in Avondale Forest Park and all the rest of them. However, it indicates a failure of Government and the top management of Coillte that, instead of realising that potential, the main activity in which they seem to have engaged in the past few years is selling land. It seems that the threats to the Irish Timber Council's sector are directly related to that failure because, in a country that should have a plentiful supply of wood, the sector does not have it. The answer to that is more public investment in planting, rather than privatisation, because a private company will merely asset-strip our forests. They will not have any interest in the sector, in public access and in the wider economy. They will only want to take what they can get and, possibly, sell it on further down the road. I wonder how the council sees the committee addressing these matters in the future, because it seems there is significant unrealised potential.

Could the council briefly comment on the question of deforestation? Because of under-planting and, possibly, over-harvesting, are we in danger of deforestation and of having an unsustainable forestry strategy?