Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 13 December 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Forestry Strategic Vision: Coillte
Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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To summarise, what I can see happening is, due to the 30,000 ha Coillte will be rewetting, there will be a battle around the country for land. Coillte now has investment companies coming in that ordinary farmers will not be able to compete with. It is a sad day for those with average land in rural Ireland. Farmers who are trying to survive on it will not be able to do so because they will have investment companies looking at 30 or 40 years of investment and Coillte will be managing it. That is a far cry from where Coillte was when I was a young lad.