Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

People have been waiting since 2007 for Coillte to provide information on the tonnage, who did the thinning, the price it cost and the cost of haulage. It has been a one-way partnership. I will be straight up with the witnesses. With regard to the questions I have asked and the stuff I have gone through, it does not bode well for Coillte to have acted in the manner it has. Coillte has been asked for a good few years for information on returns of timber, what it was worth and the cost, but that information has not been supplied. Will the witnesses give an undertaking that we will not have to bring them in again in six months to go through this and that they will sort out the old partnerships because people are very aggrieved by what has gone on? Will the witnesses tell me what the fees and marketing are? I cannot understand the marketing clause.

Am I correct that it is written into these partnership agreements that a landowner needs permission to be on his or her land? That is definitely written into one of the agreements I read. Am I also correct that when it comes to clear-fell of timber grown on bad ground, there would be insufficient money to be made taking into account costs of re-afforestation of that ground? Am I correct that if a person who is party to a partnership agreement with Coillte decides to sell, he or she must give priority in that sale to Coillte? I would like a response to those questions. There is a huge problem with these partnerships, about which every member here has been contacted. I have read a good few of the agreements.

I ask Mr. Leamy, as the chief executive office of Coillte, to address this issue with the farming organisations and the people. They way they have been treated up to now is not good enough.