Mr. Simon White:

One of the fears people in private forestry have is that there has been huge investment in conifers, which is the commercial tree in Ireland at the moment - Sitka and Norway spruce – and they are the most vulnerable to the bark beetle. We have seen what happened in ash dieback - everyone has seen it – and we are now facing the same sort of thing. We saw how ash dieback got in as a result of the lack of phyto-security. Take the type of phyto-security we have now. Licences are given and so on and there is supposed to be inspection at the port so that this disease will not come in. When you get down to it, however, the thousands of tonnes coming in cannot be inspected properly. Even in Scotland, where we are importing from, they state they cannot guarantee that the bark beetle is not there already because it is on their doorstep, 100 miles away, and it blows in the wind. We are terrified of what is going to happen and if it does happen we will be in the same boat as we were with ash dieback but it will be a much bigger problem. That is only that disease. As a result of climate change, we will be susceptible to many more diseases.

We will have to grasp the nettle. We cannot just grow native trees in this country. We only have five or six of them. We will have to look at the whole range of different species of tree and we will have to import them but we will have to import them, as was recommended by the Department’s own service years ago at the turn of the century when it said that it needed a quarantine system. We do not know that a plant is infected when it is first inspected but if one plants it in a nursery in a quarantine environment for a year, there is a good chance of it showing up. We did not do that with ash dieback. That is the sort of thing we need to do but we need to do it and we need to grow our trees in a different way. This business of monoculture which we did before left us open to disease whereby if a disease came in and took out our ash then a whole forest was gone. On the Continent it was always planted as a intimate mix. Even in our native tree-planting scheme, it is ridiculous because there is planting in blocks. One plants a block of oak and this and that, and again disease comes in.

It should be an intimate mix, but if you do that, you have to have a completely different way of planting, dealing with and managing your trees because you cannot use big machinery to wipe out everything. You have to pick your trees and look after them. It is different. It is about putting in the infrastructure, and that is what the Department needs to do. It should put the infrastructure in place instead of, as it did with the ACRES scheme, telling everyone to plant hedges when nobody had thought of where the planting material was going to come from. We had only 700,000 plants but we needed 10 million, so it could not be done. The Department needs to put the infrastructure in place and there needs to be some clear thinking. It needs to talk to the people on the ground who are used to growing trees and know what needs to be done, but it is ignoring us.