Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am not so sure about that. The problem is that the people in the forestry sector I am talking about, those that were looking at forestry, are not looking at it now. Many private farms are not looking at it with all of the other issues that have been going on with forestry for the past while. The problem we now have with the nitrates derogation is that the cost of land has been pushed up. It will not work for forestry. That is why I believe we need a dedicated agency. I know that our witnesses cannot say that and I do not know if they can support it but I would say that we need it. To be fair, the forestry sector has performed poorly and, as I said earlier and when the agriculture witnesses were before the committee, this is not just about the forestry sector but is also supposed to be part of our climate action plan. We are not performing in that sector either, a big part of which is in afforestation. Our witnesses know the numbers. We were supposed to be doing 18,000 ha and it is down to 8,000 ha and we are probably doing 2,500 ha or 4,000 ha - I do not know what the figure is at present - but it is a long way short of the aspirational target. We are going to miss that by a country mile.

The only thing I would say to our witnesses is that what Senator Daly was saying is interesting and I would agree with him. Listening to the conversation, I imagine if I was in a boardroom today and was asking about the door plugs which fell out of the 737 aeroplane and what the issue was, the Boeing company said exactly that it had all of its people who were compliant all the way along, that it had the most robust engineers, had this and had that and all of the rest of it, and guess what? The doors fell off. When they went to look at more of their doors, there was a problem. The difficulty here is that there is a problem looming here, whether we want to accept it or not, and I do not believe it is fair to say, as others have said, that because Scotland is saying it is doing a good job, we take that at face value.

If there was a significant outbreak of bark beetle, say in the midlands of Ireland tomorrow in a spruce plantation, what level of energy would come from the Department to address that and to perhaps put a task force in, and to look at what was asked for already, which was to change the scoping of material being brought into the country?

To address the point made by Mr. Delany that it must be given the chance to eradicate it, we have looked at the UK and it has not eradicated it. It is rising up along the country into Scotland at present so it does not seem to be that easy to eradicate, which is a reason one does not want it brought in. I am not questioning our witnesses' bona fides or intent but it is not adequate. We will be left in the position at some point in the future and there is no doubt that we will have bark beetle in this country and we will be then asking this question as to why we did not implement X, Y, or Z.

I go along with what was said by Senator Daly which is that there must be an opportunity for Ireland to look at re-scoping timber until we have done a root and branch review of how we are checking for this. It is not fair to put this back on Scottish authorities by saying that they told us that it was all right. That is not the precautionary principle and is not a principle at all in my mind. We should be managing our own resources and assets. We are not doing that and a significant economic risk of this beetle coming into this country is huge and I am not getting it, to be fair, from our three witnesses here this evening that they are actually addressing that. I believe they are addressing the numbers with regard to certification, licensing and regulation but that does not mean we are solving the problem and the Department should look to a task force to ensure that it is doing it properly. As Deputy Flaherty said, that should be managed externally and not within the Department because we cannot afford this in the country, in the farming sector nor can we afford it from the point of view of climate action.