Mr. Simon White:

Our groups on the different committees are waiting for it to come out, and it is possible that will be tomorrow. It is a judicial review or something. It is a legislative review of policy. We are here talking about ash dieback. I am aware of that but I am also aware that all the schemes to promote forestry in this country are coming to an end. In a year or so they are to go. They are all historical and been in place since the last century. We have had 22 years of an antiquated system that is completely out of date when we see the way EU regulations have moved. The incentives that were in place then have all been eroded, and it is why nobody is planting. It is not because they are not getting licences. Plenty of people have licences to plant but they will not do it. If people waited five years to get a licence or decided five years ago that a field would be put into forestry, they would have done something else by now or the time they would get the licence.

The licence is not the problem; the problem is the incentive. The licensing system has been in favour of Coillte, which made a very healthy profit last year in a time of crisis. Private forestry has meanwhile been ground out, with nobody supporting it. It seems as if the policy is to kill it off because we do not want private forestry in this country. That is mind-boggling when we think of climate change commitments we have made.

We have a policy in this country, according to everyone, of going from 11% forestry cover to 18% by 2030. That may now be pushed to 2050. Does anybody understand that this equates to 445,000 ha of land being planted with trees? Where is that land? Who owns that land? It is owned by private landowners and farmers. It is not owned by Coillte or the State. We must incentivise those people to plant. There is talk about a policy that involves planting 8,000 ha per year, but we are not even planting 2,000 ha. To achieve the stated goal, we would have to plant something like 20,000 ha per year. Are we doing anything like that? If we do not do it, what will it cost the State when we have to pay these fines for not doing what we said we would in our commitments in respect of climate change? Every day we read about policies to do a little thing here or there, but we must do massive things in the context of the planting of trees in this country.

The latest statement from the Minister of State is that "we cannot afford to lose any more high nature value farmland to trees". That is incredible. That statement demonstrates a lack of logic in decision-making and political direction. It is quite extraordinary. Trees are the only thing that can sequester carbon, apart from the seas. All the emphasis is on sequestering carbon in bogs and rewetting bogs, but does anybody understand that recolonising a bog with sphagnum moss, the organism to sequester carbon, takes years? Does anybody understand that the bogs we had took 6,000 to 11,000 years to grow? We have trees that would sequester 13 times as much carbon as a bog for every acre, but all the emphasis is on these crazy ideas. The answer is staring us in the face; it is about growing trees.

Young people want to grow trees and care for the environment. We need incentives to do that. The schemes are out of date. Who is doing research? That is why we want Teagasc brought in. We want to find out what research is being done to design schemes that are meaningful and that will encourage people to plant on land.