Mr. Nicholas Sweetman:

The hiring of KPMG was quoted by Coillte as a device to increase the confidence of the partners in the fairness of the contracts. The farmers' problem with that is if one is hiring somebody to look at a contract to see if the contract is fair, then the person selected should be truly independent and not selected and paid by Coillte. They shall only be looking at the accounting function. Nobody here is suggesting - I certainly do not - that Coillte is cheating on the contracts it has. Coillte is enforcing contracts that are not fair in the current situation. I am not at all suggesting that Coillte is not paying money when it is due, even though the methodology of paying the money is not acceptable to us. I am not suggesting that Coillte has set out to cheat anybody. The de factosituation, however, is that Coillte is not treating the partner fairly. Coillte is in a dominant position throughout this. Coillte has admitted that it has not communicated adequately in this regard.

The Chairman asked if there were any suggestions and I have one. There should be a protocol for a meeting between Coillte and the partner, with a set agenda where the items down for discussion can be agreed. As things stand, in a lot of the cases where the annual visit took place, the visit involved the Coillte representative coming to the farm, telling the owner the trees were grand and asking the owner to "Sign here, because if you do not sign here you will not get the State subsidy". I am not saying this was everywhere but in certain instances I am aware that it absolutely was. It is true that if the farmer did not sign on the dotted line the subsidy, or premium, would have been withheld. It was a probably a form 4 but it does not matter what the form was. It was necessary for the farmer to sign the form in order to get the premium. By extension, the farmer has then obviously had his meeting with Coillte. I am not saying this happened everywhere but I am certainly aware of several instances where that happened. In some cases the meeting consisted of the Coillte representative and one of the landowner's relatives signing per pro, and not even with the landowner present. Clearly this is not acceptable. These are aspects that Coillte itself wants to tighten up on. If the committee is asking how things can be changed this is one of the ways. There should be a proper protocol for these meetings. The five-year readjustment of the suggested increment etc. should also be clearer. It was suggested by a committee member that Coillte thinned the forests when it wanted to fill a gap in its market. That perception is very clear. Whether or not it is an accurate one I have no way of knowing, but the perception is definitely out there that Coillte takes material out of the forest to fill its own orders when it suits and when Coillte does not want to sell its own timber because the market may be wrong. Bear in mind that in some of the contracts the annual income is based on a percentage of the thinnings - in some cases 88% of the net profit from the thinnings goes to the farmer - but 88% of nothing is nothing. Very little income is forthcoming from the forest in some cases simply because the market is bad at that particular time.