Mr. Colm Hayes:

I thank the Senator for his questions. I agree with him. The afforestation target is crucial. A discussion is ongoing regarding the design of the future climate action plan and the climate Bill. Afforestation must be a key part of the solution, which might require a lot of landowners to engage in a way they have not engaged up until now. One of the lessons from the current forestry programme is that farmers have disengaged from afforestation to a certain extent. We need to understand that better. We are in a crucial phase because we are starting to design the next forestry programme. We are working on the next forestry strategy as part of Project Woodland. The farming bodies are on that, as are all of the other stakeholders. We need to clearly understand the reasons farmers disengaged. I understand and acknowledge that licensing would have been one of the factors - possibly one of the major ones - but we all need to understand better why that is the case.

When it comes to tree planting, there must be scope and there is a commitment in the programme for Government for better integration between the next CAP and the forestry programme. All these discussions are ongoing and are all crucial because they will all play their part in how we achieve the 8,000 ha target or whatever the figure is in the future. If the licences are in place, we expect north of 5,000 ha this year. If there were 4,000 ha coming into the year available to plant, in theory, those are the 8,000 hectares but we know that does not get carried through into planting. We are having that discussion as well.

In respect of the Senator's original point, I did not quite catch the 30% figure he referenced for 2021 compared to 2019. If it is in respect of felling, there were very high figures for hectares licensed in the early months of 2019, which he will have noticed were completely out of sync with the other months before and since. This is because they were on Coillte thinning licences that issued in large batches around then. We prefer the volume to be the ultimate metric because hectares do not always translate into volume. The thinning volume can be very different to the felling volume.