Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

If I may follow on from Senator Lombard's remarks, it is going to require different economics. If we are going towards 100-year forestry, which in my mind we are, it is a different model. There will be income streams from the thinnings and the management of it. We may have to pay. The way things are going in Europe and elsewhere is to have recognition of that and payment systems reflecting a 50 or 100-year cycle rather than continuous 35-year clearfell. It requires a different, longer-term economic model and I do not think we should be afraid of that.

The legislation needs to change; that was one of the recommendations in our own report. Deputy Corcoran Kennedy was on that committee as well. The report recognised that the current directions we are getting from the Bill are not fit for purpose. They need to change. Included in that is a recognition that environmental goals such as protecting water quality and biodiversity and increasing amenity and soil quality are not currently rewarded in the existing model and current legislation. I do not hear any political disagreement around the need for the legislation to change. It should be recognised that Coillte has a social remit, in that the scale of forestry we will need must knit into rural Ireland in a socially beneficial way in respect of landscape, isolation and so on. A different economic model is what is going to work best in the long term.