Mr. Colum Walsh:

A question was raised about the targeted agricultural modernisation, TAM scheme. Tending and thinning grants are available for forest owners to claim. They are €750 per hectare. These are management tools. However, if one takes forestry on board, it is a labour intensive scheme. We felt that the TAM scheme should encompass small-scale forestry machinery, not large-scale machinery costing hundreds of thousands of euro. There should be some form of a TAM scheme for forest owners. Health and safety is a big issue currently. There would potential for personal protective equipment, PPE, to be covered similar to the TAM schemes that are in place. Also, small-scale timber forwarding trailers could come under that. Forestry involves considerable manual work and areas of health and safety and manual handling could be covered. That would encourage forest owners to take on some of the work themselves and to create a tradition. It is fine for people to get in contractors, everybody in farming does that. I am farming myself and I get contractors in whenever I can. It would be nice to start a tradition of forestry by encouraging a father to do some thinning and his son might get involved and interested, and people will start to learn. That is the way the forestry service will grow and encourage more forestry. Currently, farmers know a great deal about the price of a 1 l of milk and the price of a weanling but when it comes to a cubic of metre of timber they do not know what is inside their farmgate, and that is the biggest problem we are seeing. When one talks to people at different meetings about the potential worth of their Sitka spruce plantation at clearfell, all of a sudden their ears prick up and they say they did not realise their 10 acres would be worth €100,000 at clearfell or potentially more depending on the species planted and its yield class. Forestry is at a crossroads and it needs to get through that but we need to make sure that those who commit their lands to forestry are the main beneficiaries of the sale of their product.

There was also a question about planning permission and environmental impact assessments. Ms McCormack will speak about them.