Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Coillte Annual Report 2018: Discussion

Mr. Mark Carlin:

This is obviously a big challenge for us. We are in one in four townlands in Ireland and we have 6,000 properties, so it is something we are always very aware of. We have a responsibility and farmers have a responsibility to fence in their livestock. Where we have damaged fences through our operations, we always try to do the good neighbourly thing and provide fencing materials or try to carry out the operation ourselves. We do not always get that right but, certainly, we have tried very hard in the last few years. We have reorganised our front-line operations to bring in an estates team. We have a harvesting team that looks after harvesting operations, a reforestation team which looks after planting and a dedicated estates team to deal with local issues and stakeholder engagement. We are operating in rural communities with our own staff and it is important that we are good neighbours and try to do the right thing. When there is a case of fences needing to be repaired and, clearly, it has been an issue, we always look to repair those.

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