Dr. James Moran:

It is a difficult question. We need to invest the resources now in developing a strategic land use plan for the country to have it finished by December 2023. A national land use evidence review is currently ongoing and that should be completed in the middle of 2023. Once phase 1 is completed in the next couple of weeks, we should progress straight away. We should not wait for phase 2 but start the process of developing our strategic land use plan, integrated across food, fibre, energy production, biodiversity and climate responses. This should be based on evidence. Currently, we do not have sufficient resources inputted into our national land use evidence review, even the very basic aspect of trying to get an understanding of the land cover of the country. We have been talking about the need for a national land cover map and a national land monitoring strategy for over ten years at this stage. It was instigated in 2020 and was due to be completed in the first quarter of 2021. Then it was the fourth quarter of 2021 and then the first quarter of 2022. People like myself and other groups volunteered to do the validation because there were not enough resources put into it by the State and now it is to be published this month. This will give us evidence, for the first time ever, on a field-by-field basis, and we will know what the land cover of the country is. Up until now we have been dependent, on a very coarse scale, on a Corine satellite map from Europe. It is ridiculous that we have been ten years developing that. That is purely because of resources.

We should put our shoulders to the grindstone now and take that evidence from the national land use evidence review. The report I am talking about was submitted to the Department of the end of September. I possibly should not be saying this but I am going to say it anyway because it has to be said. That should be published. It was sent for typesetting on 27 September. It has taken six weeks to print a 100-page document that answers a lot of the questions we are addressing here. There is something wrong here. It is with the Minister for ministerial sign-off. He should sign off the bloody thing and put the information out there in the public domain so we can actually start making evidence-informed decisions. The Government has to stop being worried about what the actual facts say and put them out there. We have an intelligent public. We should not be worried politically about what people are going to think. Put the evidence in front of the people, warts and all, and make the decisions based on the evidence. We need to put our strategic land use plan in place.

As I said before, State companies and State agencies have to start leading on this. We should change the legislation and the Forestry Act, and change the remit of Bord na Móna. Any profits that Coillte generates, before they go back to the State, should be reinvested in solving the legacy issues that we have created. It is not Coillte's problem or that of the staff working in Coillte at the moment. We as a State created the issues we have with forests on peatlands. The dividend goes back to the State from Coillte.

That should be first reinvested into Coillte Nature and all our State lands in order to solve this. Before any other economic activity is done on them, they should have a biodiversity net gain and a carbon net gain imposed on them, before they actually generate any other economic activity in terms of a response to the crisis-----