Mr. Simon White:

I thank the Senator. I will pass him a photograph of what the woods actually look like. Can he see any salvageable timber in that? They have been destroyed. That is just to give him some idea. There is very little salvage value. With many of the trees I had to cut down because they were dangerous, the first 10 ft of the tree has gone to mush. The trees are dying and breaking down in front of us. Regarding the salvage value, the cost of taking out large trees is way beyond anything that would make it worthwhile. You have to get them out of the way in order to clear the ground and it becomes much more difficult. That is the cost of doing so.

The other question was on the future of ash. We worked with the GAA on trying to design schemes to identify trees that might be immune to ash dieback disease. The scheme being proposed involves taking out all the trees. Certain trees may be left in but that is impossible to do if the ground is being cleared. You cannot leave a tree where there is a bulldozer moving around. That would just not work and it is naïve to think it could. There are other ways of doing it in certain areas. Maybe there are some areas where people should be paid a premium to leave their trees where they are, take out the dead trees and allow regeneration to go on. Maybe in doing that, we would be able to identify some trees to propagate and bring on, because ash is incredibly important. After 40 years of elm disease, an immune elm is being developed in Holland of all places. There is a possibility, therefore, but at the moment it is going to have to be filled in by bamboo and things like that, for producing hurleys. We need to get onto that. We need innovative thinking. Teagasc is doing a tiny amount of research into immune trees. The amount of effort it is putting into forestry became obvious when, in the third quarter of last year, Teagasc's latest research booklet, which is full of the research the organisation is doing, did not feature one word on forestry. Teagasc is getting €750,000 from the State for forestry. The mind boggles at what is going on.