Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to address the committee and I am also thankful to you, Chairman, and the members of the committee for the work to date on forestry given that it feeds so much into the global agenda of climate action. I think we all agree on that. It must be acknowledged that this committee is giving a significant priority to forestry issues in a way that I have never witnessed in my time here.

I have a specific case that I wish to raise. I have referred it to the Minister of State by email. It has been the subject of parliamentary questions. It is TFL00177018. To me, this case is the kernel of the issue as it relates to applications for felling licences. The woman in question who made the application made it on 28 June 2018 and she contacted the forestry service on 7 April this year after bringing in a consultant and much toing and froing. At this stage, a conservative estimate is that there are up to 100 pieces of correspondence between her, as the applicant, and the Department. She was told on 7 April that they could not tell her when an ecologist would be appointed to deal with her file. This is a woman, a farmer, with a modest income who wanted to play her part and to raise her family. She wants to contribute to climate action and to ensure that she earns a modest income or return from that application. The return on this will be very modest. She is not a big farmer. She is not rich.

We are hitting four years with this application, and I cannot tell this person, despite all the engagement I have had with the Minister of State's Department, when she can reasonably expect to receive her felling licence. This crystallises the issue.

We may get into the weeds in this committee concerning who represents the commercial foresters and who represents others. The fact remains, however, that there is a perception, whether we like it or not, that preference and priority is given to Coillte applications and that the screening, and the rules for screening, do not seem to apply as rigorously to Coillte applications as they do to applications coming from private forestry owners. I just want to be able to go back to my constituent - who is a decent and hard-working person who has raised a family on a modest holding - and be able to tell her that she will have her licence this year. Preferably, l would like to be able to tell her she will have her licence in the next two or three months. I say that because harvest plans have been produced and this person was told before that the ecology report was being worked on. As public representatives, we are not getting clear sight of what is happening internally in the Department. Therefore, the Minister of State can surely understand why frustration arises when there are named people in the Department who have responsibility for implementing the policy. They are seen as the go-to people. It is a small country where everybody knows everybody, so people get frustrated and people get named. The Minister of State will understand why that happens.

People perceive that blockages are being put in place. In this case it is almost Kafkaesque, based on the correspondence I have seen between this applicant and the Department. This person's consultant, a person who adheres to the most rigorous professional standards, made the application and did the harvest plan for her. After years interacting with the forestry service, and this consultant is a forester himself, he is now scratching his head and saying he cannot understand why this applicant is not getting her licence. This sums up the situation. Can the Minister of State understand the frustration of organisations like SEEFA, when their representatives are telling her they are selling saplings to Scotland, but they cannot put saplings in the ground here?

I am trying to take the heat out of this matter, but I am deeply frustrated because I see the massive potential forestry has in the context of dealing with climate change. If there is a target of 8,000 ha, why is that not being reached? There is massive potential here, and we all instinctively know what it is. I understand what the Minister of State is saying about the housing sector and the potential for forestry to deliver in that regard, and we need a commercial forestry sector for that aspect. There are also private foresters, however, who want to contribute to taking action on climate change, who want to grow native species as well and who want to make their contribution to achieving the target to which the Minister of State referred, but they cannot see how they are going to do that now.

I will go back to this woman of whom I have spoken to tell her I have raised this topic today. Hopefully, she will get her licence as soon as possible because of the Minister of State's intervention. When I ask her, though, whether she will plant trees after this experience, I guarantee that her answer will be: "No, I will never go near forestry again". These are the people we are taking out of the equation because of the system that exists. I refer to the honest-to-goodness farmers who planted a bit of ground. As SEEFA has said, those bits of ground are those farmers' wealth. If confidence among these people is dampened, then it will be very difficult to regenerate it. I would love to be able to tell my constituent about the systems that have been put in place, the regulatory review, the Mackinnon report, the stakeholders all coming together and there being many more policy interventions now to create more incentives. I guarantee, though, that she will never go near planting forestry again, and I am sure we are speaking about thousands of people like her now.

In the context of the Minister of State digging out this file, I served as a Minister of State for five years and I used to get into the nitty-gritty of details. If I was the Minister of State with special responsibility for forestry now and if a member of this committee raised a matter concerning a particular file, then I would say that I wanted that file on my desk in the Department in the afternoon. I would read that file, and then I would ask questions regarding why this system is not working. I would be getting down into the weeds of every file I could, and I would be asking why things were not happening. That is what I would do, and I say that modestly. I thank the Chair for granting me latitude.