Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 25 January 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Forestry Policy and Strategy: Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Photo of Pippa HackettPippa Hackett (Green Party)
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I might kick off and then will share with the Minister, Deputy McConalogue. On the Senator's last comment about C.J. Sheeran, he has an amazing set-up in Mountrath. I have visited myself. He is right: "trees, trees and trees". We are all agreed on that. That is something we can agree on.

The Mackinnon report, which the Senator is particularly concerned about, is why we established Project Woodland. That was the basis on which we established Project Woodland. It was to form a plan and to implement the Mackinnon report as much as we could. We divided the recommendations of the report into the four working groups. There were the reducing the backlog group; a shared national approach group, which was to work on a forest strategy; an organisation, development and communications group; and process improvements, which was to look at forestry licensing procedures. There have therefore been a number of key outcomes of Project Woodland. It is coming to the end, which is good because it has achieved far and away everything it has set out to achieve. We have our shared national vision, and our forest strategy is on the verge of being published. We have had a regulatory review implementation plan. These were all recommendations by the Mackinnon report. We have a process for the weekly dashboard and the backlog statistics. We have a training needs analysis, organisational review, forestry strategy implementation plan, an updated customer charter and we have refreshed COFORD. These were some of the recommendations. I do not know whether there is one in which the Senator is particularly interested.

For the record, Jo O’Hara is a “she” and a very competent “she”. She has been an excellent source of support and advice and her role in Project Woodland has been central and I am glad she involved herself in it as deeply as she did.

We are pretty much there with the Mackinnon report. There are one or two implementations we cannot implement because they are just not implementable-----