Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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The forestry proposal came from the Climate Change Advisory Council; it did not come from my Department or me. However, the recommendation is the right thing to do in the context of recognising that forestry is very complicated in terms of the sequestration of carbon. There is often a decade delay between planting and seeing carbon being sequestered. To manage and increase the early flows of funding into that, the recommendation was that it would be measured over a three-decade period, including in this first decade. We will make sure that it is not a double-counting, but the Climate Change Advisory Council felt the timing of the counting in that way would see a significant increase in the level of forestation. We need to go from 2,500 ha to the sort of figures of up to 20,000 ha we were doing in the 1990s. We need a different form of forestry. It needs to be switched away from a clearfell monoculture-type system, which does not have as good of storage characteristics and other biodiversity consequences, to massively scale up new agroforestry, such as close to nature, continuous cover and other forestry systems. The Climate Change Advisory Council advice on this is good and we will look to follow it.

With regard to financialisation, I do not intend that at all, but we need private as well as public finance. Such is the scale of the transition. However, no one in Government or elsewhere is being cautious, hawkish or whatever word one wants to put on it, about the scale of investment. Going back to our earlier conversations, the biggest restriction is whether we have the workers to be able to deliver. We could pump a huge amount of money into retrofitting or capital construction projects, but in the absence of having the capacity to deliver them, it would be a waste of money.

There is a massive expansion planned in the budgets, with €35 billion in public money for transport, €12.5 billion in public money-----