Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have two or three brief questions for the officials. When the recent legislation was before the Dáil we were told that it would help to speed up licensing and felling. What has gone wrong? If the officials wanted one thing today to speed this up, what would they seek?

Second, we have a crisis now. It is one of the biggest crises in forestry since the foundation of the State. This will get worse. Twenty years hence, people will look back and ask what this Parliament and Government did about forestry, particularly with all the talk about carbon, the environment and saving the environment. Is the Minister of State taking an active role in this? Is she bringing anything forward to encourage more people to plant and get more people to stop objecting? Can any campaign be done by the Department to advise people on how important this is for the economy, the country and the environment?

There is real frustration at present. People do not want to go into forestry. Like everything in this country, it is over-regulated. We are over-regulated in planning and in every Department. Over the last 20 years everything has been over-regulated and people are now fed up. They are not even bothering to do anything. It is the same with housing. Everybody was giving out about the builders and about building houses. Now, there is a crisis and people want houses to be built. It is the same with timber. There is a crisis and people have to go to Scotland to buy timber. It is an awful situation in this country. There is some marginal land on which people should be growing forests. Instead, there is a crisis and people are competing in Scotland to buy forestry to keep jobs in this country. It is a very sad situation.

Those are my few questions.