Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is unfair to say the working groups are not working. They are working incredibly hard. They are made up of a broad spectrum of stakeholders from across the forestry, environment, farmer groups and community groups. It is difficult work because this is a very complex, difficult situation. To be honest I want to say hats off to them because they have worked incredibly hard this past year. Project Woodlands was set up last February so it is up and running a little over a year. They are still working together. I will take a bit of offence at it being said they are not working because they certainly are.

On the question of whether I feel embarrassed, we are all here working very hard, including everyone in this room, to get a solution to forestry. If it was as easy as some of the Deputies and members here maybe think it is, we would not have it solved. We would actually be in a worse position. We would be back to where we were in 2020 and worse, so we are making progress. I accept it is slow and frustrating. I totally accept that, but we have ultimately to get to a position where we are working with the farmers, the communities, the industry and the wider population. To focus solely, as many in this committee room do, on just commercial forestry is wrong because that has got us into much of the difficulty we are in and is perhaps where we have made mistakes in the past. We developed a model that has been built around planting and clear felling and that does not blend well with our environment or with communities. We have to think a bit beyond and outside the box. I am saying we absolutely have to have a vibrant commercial sector in the next 30, 40, 50 or 100 years. I say that with no qualms at all, but maybe we have to start looking differently at how we do that. There are proposals around continuous cover. That is continuous cover commercial forestry. That takes a long while to get on board and get running. We have to thin it in different ways and manage it in different ways. We have to look at different ways of doing it. Continuing to promote the same model we have been doing for past ten, 15 or 20 years is not going to work. We need people like the members in this room to think outside the box in terms of how we get the sector on a road to future sustainability.