Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the representatives for coming in. The Forestry Licensing Dashboard features a little section on licences issued versus planting. A yellow box indicates the planting for 2023. It does not give us the figures but I am fairly all right at maths and, going by what I am looking at, it was less than 50 ha in January. I would need a pair of glasses to see what the planting was for the first three weeks of February but it is probably 60 ha to 65 ha. That information is there for anybody to get. The representatives probably get that publication.

There is a reality here. Figures are being banded around the place. Since 2016, and we will soon be ten years into this, we have achieved, in all years, less than half of the 8,000 ha we predicted. If we take the guts of a ten-year period, between 2,000 and 4,000 ha were planted per year and, last year, approximately 2,700 ha were planted. It needs to be understood that farmers waited three years for licences. They do not wait but move on. That is the reality. We have an incompetent Department, to be quite frank about it. We have two Ministers who will not make a decision to move the people in that Department somewhere, whether it is out to the Phoenix Park to look at trees or whatever. There is a problem. We have to call a spade a spade. Everything is being blamed on the habitats directive. I was below on a bog and I knew about it in 2012, as did the Department. Let us not give the excuse of going to court or whatever. We have to cover ourselves on all those things.

If there is a deficit in that amount of timber over ten years, what is the consequence? The general rule of thumb is spruce takes 30 years to grow. That is the first question. I will throw a blast of questions together in order to get them done as quick as I can. Under the proposed land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF, we are talking about 25,000 ha to 30,000 ha of forestry a year. Do the representatives think the people who came up with those ideas need tablets or something, when we cannot plant 2,000 ha? What is their view on that? Everyone in the timber mills understands that we are now coming to the stage where private operators are coming in with as much timber as Coillte. Does that pose a problem? My understanding is operators have to be ISO and quality assured in order to get rid of timber. Is there a private side to that whereby Coillte has all the paperwork done on accreditation for selling timber? Is a problem arising or are the representatives' organisations working with the private sector to deal with that? Are they concerned that the Minister of State keeps talking about us moving towards broadleaf only? Is that a concern for the industry down the road? This is just a point of view, but the Gresham House deal is done. There is no point in us talking about it any more because when we brought it up, no one made a move to stop it. The bottom line on it is some of the people involved in the deal were before the committee and told us they were very concerned about our climate. The fact is, however, that if someone buys forestry that is already standing more than five years, it is already accounted for. We got a pure BS story.

On the industry itself and the difficulties it had for a few years, what were the knock-on effects, as the man says, on the main three or four mills around the country? We have to think of the guys with the forwarders, harvesters and all of that. I remember meeting a man in the area in which the Chair lives one night. We both talked to him and he told us he was desperate.

He was desperate because he was being put out of business by what had gone on down through the years.

At the moment the supply of timber is pretty good. Have the witnesses any concerns? If I have a calf born on the farm, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will know and the factories will know down the line. The factories will know how many cattle are coming for sale. As I understand it, no inventory is done by Coillte. How do the witnesses know whether there will be a feast or a famine in five, seven, 12 or 15 years? Do they know the volumes that are coming, do they have any inventories that are accurate from the likes of Coillte, or is there any way to know they can tender for a certain amount of work and for them not to be having their tongues out, as it were, bringing it in from Scotland?

Being brutally honest, there is no point in us dressing mutton up as lamb here. The farming organisations have been constantly at it and the committee has been constantly at it, but the reality is we have had all the reports in the world and all of the talking shops we could have in the world. We have highlighted it, and in fairness to the committee, the only way the witnesses got their licences, to be quite frank about it, was out of the embarrassment of bringing those responsible in front of the committee. In fairness to all the public representatives on the committee, they threw their hearts into it because we saw the danger of the coming job losses.

However, this is not cured. One bit of the problem might be keeping the witnesses limping, but we have a huge problem coming down the tracks with emissions targets, because if we are not planting, we will be in trouble with emissions targets. This is coming. It is the farmer, of course, always gets the kick in the ass about their emissions being a certain amount. The offset is because of incompetence within the Department. It is my honest opinion, and I have said it and even spoken to the Taoiseach on it, that unless that Department is changed around, we will be talking next year and the year after about the fact, and I predict it now and this will be on record, that the year 2023 will be the lowest year on record for planting in Ireland, and the witnesses talked about since the war, because our submission has not yet gone to Europe. It will be between two and eight months. Two horse dealers think they can get it in four or five months. If we even go by some magical thing that it is turned around in six months, the year is over.

Looking at what is planted there now, we got this story in the audiovisual room that 7,000 ha are already granted and all those people can come into the de minimisscheme and happy days. We put it to them that day that those people had been waiting for so long - three years - to get their licences that they are as well off to throw them on the fire and burn them because it might warm them better than the trees they were to sow. There is a reality that people in the Department are living in a fairyland and it is no good to the timber industry or to us here. If you talked to farmers this minute and asked them about forestry, they would run a mile from it. There is no point in saying they would not.