Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the opportunity to make my views known on behalf of the people I represent. I have been trained from a young age to treat everybody with nothing but respect and courtesy, and the Chairman knows I will act that way today. However, today is testing me very much and I will tell you why. I am personal friends with farmers whose lives have been held up, disrupted and upset and whose financial situations have been detrimentally affected. I am friends and personally close with contractors who own forwarders, harvesting equipment and lorries that are on the road. They slaved to get those lorries going. These are fellows who started out at a very young age. I am proud to be friends with one man who celebrated a special birthday recently and who recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary. That man has been on the road and hauling timber as long as I can remember. He is a highly respectable man with a great family coming up after him who are involved in the harvesting business and taking trees out of the wood, drawing them away and all that type of work.

I am personal friends with millers, people who own a mill. Their operation might look like a big one from the road or the sky and one would say money is not a worry for those people. It is a worry for them because they are up to their eyes in debt. All they want to do is get timber in. The people who need the timber at the other side, including the users, the building contractors, the people who want to build homes and the construction industry want to use their own timber and do not want to be drawing it in from the rest of the world.

The reason I am cross and exercised about this issue is that I know every one of the people involved in the sector, that is, those involved in growing, harvesting and milling timber. I know them all. I think of what they have been put through. They see us today, including myself, dressed in suits, shirts and ties, and with clean hands. They have worked so hard in their industry and they are looking at the officials and asking what in the name of God they are doing. I assure the Chairman that I am going to control what I am going to say but if I were in the officials' shoes, I would be ashamed. They gave us assurances most recently on 29 January and I would be ashamed to think that nothing has improved since then. If anything, it is backwards we are going. That is a fact. Deputy Fitzmaurice indicated earlier that we are taking one step back and half a step forward. I think of what the officials are doing to the people. The confidence in the timber-growing industry in Ireland is completely gone. No farmer or young person would dream of planting a bit of ground because all they are hearing is negativity.

The Department is not capable of issuing a felling licence or a thinning licence. It is incapable of issuing a licence or permit for a person to construct a road. If it does issue a licence, it then tells people to do impossible things. We are dealing with the issuing of permits. Fellows are being told to import all the material and not to backfill a road, the way we have always dug a road. One digs out the clay, buries the bog, brings up the clay and makes a road as one goes along. We have people telling others to take off the bog and draw every bit of material from a quarry nearby. No one in his or her right mind could even undertake such a process because it would cost a mental fortune of money that no farmer or person developing a road could even imagine. We are not a local authority. We are not being funded from Europe. My goodness, we are talking about farmers who only want access to the timber they want to cut and sell. They want to manage their forests properly and cannot do so because of the Department's incompetence. I would be ashamed to be an official coming before the committee today. How in the name of God can the officials go to bed at night thinking they have brought a fine industry to its knees?

We are one of the best countries in the western world for growing timber. If you threw a sapling on the ground, it would be up to your knees in no time. God gave us this country. He gave us growth conditions. My goodness, I think of the highly respectable people who I adore, foresters who did so much in our area to encourage people to plant trees, and the shambles the Department has made of the whole thing. The officials are incapable of processing a few God-damn permits.