Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour)
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I thank Mr. Murphy for his presentation. Does he not feel embarrassed that Coillte, as a semi-State company managing State assets, working in partnership with farmers, has let down those farmers, many of them elderly or widowed? It has failed to communicate with them in a proper, open and transparent way, explaining every step in the process and what is due at the various stages of the contract. I note that Coillte has now engaged PR companies and everything else but it is a bit late for many of those people. I accept that from here on in, the issue is being viewed in a different light.

Coillte is a big organisation. Has it not failed to ensure the people in a weaker position were properly advised and communicated with? Let us call a spade a spade. It was vital that such people clearly understood the terms of the original contract. Mr. Murphy noted that many of them received legal advice. Is he able to say that in each of the 630 contracts, he has documentation to prove the people were properly and legally advised?

Coillte is in a dominant position. We understand that some people do not even realise that on completion of felling they would have to be replanted, which is the equivalent of effective sterilisation. After the 30 or 40 years are up, the farmer is back in the cycle again. Has Coillte established a proper forum for farmers to ventilate their grievance? KPMG has been retained but that is from Coillte's side. Its review is the equivalent of trying to unscramble the egg. It is one side of it. KPMG is operating under Coillte's instructions. It will just ensure that payments are properly calculated in accordance with the contract. Surely, in view of the one-sided nature of the contract, there should be an effort to review the contracts in a current context and apply current valuations, terms and conditions thereto. In the interests of restoring trust and confidence, the contracts should be rejigged. That seems to be very important. Some of them were taken out in 1993 and 1994 which is 25 years ago. I was first elected to the Dáil in 1992 - it is a lifetime away. Many things have changed in the interim for those people.

I acknowledge that Mr. Murphy said that if somebody has not fully understood the nature and extent of the contract, in certain circumstances Coillte is prepared to negotiate his or her exit, which is fair enough. That is what I understood he said - maybe he did not. Perhaps I am not very clever but I thought that was there. In that context, what does it mean for someone who has been in for 25 years and wants to get out, given that Coillte is saying that at the end of the felling process people have to go back in and replant? Does that take them out of being bound by that additional term? That is very important.

While I might not be too well up on this, the terms and conditions under which contracts were predicated seem to have changed. There were things such as increased growth rates, earlier maturity and a shortening of the rotation period. These farmers, many of them elderly, were in the inferior position in terms of their contractual understanding; they expected it to be 40 years or so. How often has Coillte reviewed them? I thought a review was supposed to have taken place every five years. That does not appear to have been the position. I have listened carefully to the IFA presentations and that does not appear to be the position.

Is it the case that Coillte was harvesting to suit itself because there was a timber deficit? In the valley period, did Coillte harvest to suit itself, irrespective, and without letting anyone else know about it? Those are the questions I have to ask. If there was harvesting at times of early maturity, were the concomitant payments as a result brought forward to reflect that and paid out to farmers? I am trying to garner from what has been said that there is early maturity and, thankfully, trees appear to be growing better. Of course, there are a lot of targets to meet in the forestry and Coillte area. Coillte has a role to play in that but private farmers seem to be leading the way with 18,000 of them working on it. Those are some of the issues of which I took note. The five-year adjustment is very important. Has that been kept up to speed? Can the witnesses indicate to us where the vast bulk of the 630 farmers, or partnerships as I call them, are located. Are they in Cork, Kilkenny or Carlow, Laois or across the midlands? I noticed the excellent programme by George Lee, which I praise again, and our Chairman has been in the vanguard in this area also. George Lee did an excellent public service because we would not have heard a work about this without his programme. In fairness to the Chairman, the committee had been on about this in December. He brought it out and I saw a whole cohort of people I felt very sorry for. I saw an elderly man of 73 who thought he should have got a big share but who got nothing. Another man with two parcels of land failed to maintain. Another lady had 90 acres. There was a horrendous lack of transparency. Another person had been at annual meetings but no information was given. Those people are hard-working and decent and they were frustrated and disappointed. I felt very hurt for them having been a strong supporter of Coillte over the years when I had good reason to be. However, those people have had a major influence on my attitude to Coillte which is a very large organisation charged with a great responsibility. It has behaved in a cavalier manner to those people and it has a lot of ground to make up. It will take a lot of PR companies to come back after a lot of people in Ireland watched George Lee on the news.