Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

If I divide that by 9,500 jobs, it makes one job per 92 ha approximately. The point is that in my part of the country many people are negative about forestry. The reason is that whole parishes and townlands have been wiped out because farm after farm has been planted, not usually by farmers, but by companies which bought the land farmers could not compete for. There is a lot of negativity. People hear there are a lot of jobs in forestry, but they only see one person working in that farm for a week after 20 years, when it is being thinned, and another week ten years later, when it is being thinned again, and then when it is being clearfelled and replanted. They do not see jobs in their communities. That is an issue with forestry and it needs to be recognised. There are many parts of the country, especially in County Leitrim and other parts of the west, where we have had our ample share of forestry and we cannot take more and more land being planted and more and more communities being left in a situation where schools are closing and the community cannot feed a football team because the parishes are being wiped out and destroyed. It is an issue I ask the Minister of State to bear in mind because it is serious and it is causing a lot of opposition to forestry.