Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and the committee members for the invitation to today’s meeting. I am glad to be here with the Minister of State and her team, the departmental team and the forestry leadership team to discuss our forest strategy and the overall direction of forestry policy with members of the committee.

We are discussing the Government’s approach to expanding, protecting and developing our forests and woodlands for the benefit of the environment, farmers and the rural economy. We will be concise and to the point in our opening statement. It is important to have as much time as possible for discussion on the matter.

In light of recent events and events associated with forestry during the past decade, I feel the need to be frank. When the Minister of State and I came to office, the forestry sector was on life-support. Confidence had been eroded. Licence applications were backed up. Afforestation rates had collapsed. A broken appeals system had ground licensing to a halt, with 6,000 licences had been waiting more than 120 days for approval. That number has reduced by nearly 5,000 now. This came as a result of a court ruling which required significantly more scrutiny on each application which delayed every single application. That is how the backlog had evolved prior to our taking office. The situation was dire.

The Minister of State and I, working closely with our Department officials, set about to fix that problem but with the problems being so deep-rooted, it took time. Like any business, we rolled up our sleeves, we identified the problem and we have fixed it through investment, hard work and determination. I will not to go into statistics apart from just one to show just how more efficient the licensing system has become. In 2022, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine issued 4,713 licences, which is over 1,200 more licences issued than applications received. We have seen real progress here, but we have more to do.

The culmination of our determination and hard work in the forestry sector is our new €1.3 billion forestry programme. This is the most farmer-focused forestry programme ever devised by the Department. This is a Rolls-Royce programme aimed at supporting farmers. It is fully Exchequer funded and is therefore subject to EU state aid approval. We are engaging intensively with the European Commission in order to secure this approval as soon as possible and indeed, we updated all Oireachtas Members on that process in detail on Wednesday morning of last week.

The new programme will do four things. It will see farmers get 20-year premiums and non-farmers get 15-year premiums. Previously, there were only 15-year premiums. It will see premiums increased by up to 66%. It puts farm families at the very centre of the plan and it will help us achieve the annual afforestation rate of 8,000 ha per year needed to hit our climate targets. Farmers will also receive single farm payment on afforested land. Other landowners will not receive this payment.

I refer to the recent announcement of the agreement between Coillte, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, and Gresham House. At the outset, the structure of the deal between Coillte, ISIF and Gresham House is not our preferred option. Our preferred option is for farmers to plant forest on their own land and that is what we have designed the new forestry programme to achieve. However, this fund is an option Coillte has put in place to help us reach our extremely ambitious forestry targets. The total area of new forests planted through the fund will deliver approximately 3.5% of the 100,000 ha of new forests Coillte has committed to enabling between now and 2050. The fund will plant less than 1% of the State’s overall target of 450,000 ha of new forests nationally by 2050. Coillte and ISIF have entered into binding contractual arrangements in respect of this initiative, which has commenced its work, the afforestation element of which is expected to last for five years. As the committee knows, the Government had asked Coillte to get back into afforestation in order to help the country meet its ambitious forestry targets. The independent semi-State company, through its strategic vision, which was launched in early 2022, set a target of 100,000 ha of afforestation by 2050.

Coillte has indicated that it is examining all options to identify partners and mechanisms to enable this ambition. Working within its remit as an independent semi-State company and engaging in an independent tendering process, Coillte established its strategic fund.

This was not a decision that required Government sign-off. Building afforestation momentum in a sector that has essentially been in cardiac arrest is necessary but there are various options to reach our ambitions. That is why the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, and I have asked Coillte to examine closely how it can work more closely with the State as well as farmers and local communities. We are stating clearly today that this type of strategy is not our preferred option for strategic partnerships in the sector. Again, our preferred option is for farmers to plant trees on their own land, which is what we have been incentivising through the new €1.3 billion forestry programme. We want all strategies to be based on working in partnership with farmers to support their ambitions for forestry.

We must also be realistic. For various reasons, forestry plantations are not where we want them to be. Afforestation rates have not reached their heyday of the late 1990s and early 2000s for a raft of reasons. We have hugely ambitious climate targets, with forestry planting at the very centre of these ambitions. Forestry is truly the ace up our sleeve as we face into a decade where we will need to reach 8,000 ha of forestry planting each year. We have 11.6% of the country under forestry at the moment, with a target of reaching 18% by 2050. For this reason, the State, the sector and the industry must pull all possible levers to get us to our hugely ambitions targets. We have focused efforts on delivering a forestry programme for our farmers and landowners. That is our ambition. We have a new vision for forestry. It a game changer for reaching our climate targets. It will deliver for farm family incomes, create a vibrant industry in rural Ireland and be the envy of the world.

I am heartened to see the cross-committee support for forestry and for improving our afforestation rates in the country. We have much work to do about changing the perception of forestry. Increasing our afforestation rates will be good for the environment, our climate targets and, critically, farm family incomes. Farmers are at the heart of our new forestry programme. We want farmers and existing landowners to be the primary beneficiaries of the €1.3 billion forestry programme and that will be the case. We are at the dawn of a brilliant, bright and exciting future of forestry. We are all looking forward to working together to see Ireland become a leader in the forestry sector in the years ahead. I thank the Chairman for the opportunity to make an initial opening statement.