Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There is a lot to go through there. I accept that we are at a stage where we need to rebuild confidence in the sector and among farmers. Saying that, I have visited many happy forest owners across the country as part of my job. We do not tend to hear from them. They choose not to shout about it or if they do, they get drowned out by so much negativity in the sector, which we absolutely have to counter. It is a very important role. We have 24,000 forest owners in the country and tens of thousands of them are very happy with their lot, their forests and the supports they have had with them.

Ash dieback is a critical issue. That is why the independent review was commissioned in the summer. The Minister and I have sat down many times with different stakeholders. The requests and asks have been broad. That is what necessitated an independent review. We sought to collate all of those requests into a set of recommendations, which we now have. That was an essential part of the process for dealing with ash dieback. The previous scheme was only launched just before the Government was formed back in June 2020. It was compounded by a delay in the licensing process, which did not help. Covid did not help either. It landed at probably the worst possible time, which did not help with engagement with the scheme. Nevertheless, several hundred farmers did engage with it and farmers continue to engage with it. Like me, I think members should encourage farmers to engage with the scheme as it is now because silviculturally, these trees have to be cleared and farmers will have to get a licence to do that. The longer farmers are asked to wait, the longer they will have to wait. If they engage and apply for the ash dieback scheme as it stands, the process will start. They will be in the system and their licence will be issued in due course. Encouraging farmers to delay that process would be very counterproductive as regards what we want to achieve in the area of ash dieback.

As I said to Deputy Kehoe, we simply cannot just hand out money. As a member of the EU, we are obliged to operate within the EU state aid rules. Those rules area quite detailed in relation to forestry and differ from the state aid rules on crops and livestock. Sometimes comparisons are made between ash dieback and TB payments. Different state aid rules apply and we have to be cognisant of that. There is a stand-alone set of rules that relates to forestry payments and how we can support farmers. We will explore every nook and cranny. It is my intention to find the mechanism through which we can support farmers who have been affected by this disease.

As the Deputy said, bark beetle is another issue that we are incredibly conscious of. We take great measures to keep it out of our country. We only bring in barked products from one part of Scotland, which is a pest-free area. Any timber we import from the rest of Europe has be debarked, so the risk is low. It is something we are keeping an eye on. We know it is spreading further and further north up through the UK. We ensure bark is imported from a pest-free area and we check everything that comes in very thoroughly.

On the forestry programme and the state aid process, there was a lot of engagement in advance of making our submission for the forestry programme. Even after we made the submission, there was a lot of over and back with incredibly detailed requests and responses. Letters of 30 and 40 pages were being exchanged, requesting information, asking us for scientific information and sometimes the other way around, to try to come to the agreement that we came to. While there are changes in the programme compared to previous ones, they were absolutely necessary to ensure that this programme does not repeat some of the mistakes of past programmes, particularly in previous decades. That was essential.

Replanting is an obligation under our Forestry Act and under relatively new EU deforestation laws. It is an obligation we have to meet. We are fully supportive of all tree types. Conifers are important in that.

On the licensing system, we have invested massively in personnel, ecologists, inspectors and engineers. We have changed systems in the Department. The backlog is no longer an issue. I want to be clear on that. When we started the whole analysis, there was an all-time high of around 6,000 licences in the backlog, as we defined it. The current number is about 1,000. We work through them and it is not really a backlog anymore. It is a continuous stream of licences.