Mr. Nicholas Sweetman:

To answer the question about what the IFA could do to contact the people involved, it needs to be understood that roughly 18,000 farmers planted forestry, only 630 of whom have contracts with Coillte. We do not know who has a contract with who as we are not privy to that information. However, at local level we have said that if anyone wishes to have us work on his or her behalf if he or she is having difficulty, we will do so. We are all aware individually of some of the problems being encountered in various counties.

Deputy Willie Penrose asked a question about early maturing forestry in the context of reducing the projected period of 40 years to 30 and the effect this would have. I must admit that in some cases it would be advantageous for the farmer to have a shorter rotation in so far as Coillte has in some contracts toploaded, if one will, the annuity paid. However, in earlier contracts there was a fixed sum annuity, in which cases it would really be disadvantageous to have a shorter cycle.

Deputy Willie Penrose also asked about the obtaining of legal advice. It is true that many of the people I know of received legal advice. I cannot say whether everyone received legal advice, but I do not know many solicitors who knew anything about forestry in the 1990s, let alone who were competent to give legal advice on it. It also came to my attention that the estimated income contained in some contracts was way off current values and had not been adjusted. Every five years there was supposed to be a readjustment of the projected income. In contracts I have looked at there has been no readjustment for over 20 years. Therefore, instead of every five years, there has been no readjustment for over 20 years, which is a problem. If the Deputy were to ask me what the big issue was, I would say it was a complete lack of transparency and contact between Coillte and its partners. It was to be expected that Coillte would try to have a contract which was at least beneficial to it, but to do so without having the farmers' understanding of just how beneficial it was to it, to my mind, was deeply unfair.