Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

I want to use this opportunity to appeal to members of the public to resist with every fibre of their being the agenda to begin to sell our vital State assets in order to pay off gambling debts of bankers and speculators. It is one of the most obscene aspects of the austerity agenda. The obscenity and madness of it is summed up in the consideration of the sale of Coillte.

It has 7% of the land mass of the country. Any State enterprise with 7% of the land mass of the country and which presides over a huge chunk of our natural heritage, vital public amenities and something that could produce employment, revenue and wealth for the State is, by any definition, a vital strategic asset. How could it be defined as anything else?

The idea of a private company owning that sums up the image that people will be charged to visit our forests and that private companies will cut down trees and deforest the country to sell trees for cash. The real obscenity comes when one considers what private companies might bid for Coillte if it comes up for the sale. The chairman of the International Forestry Fund is former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. It is a subsidiary of Helvetia Wealth, a Swiss wealth asset management company, in effect a money-laundering company for the super wealthy.

These are the sort of people who could potentially own 7% of the land mass of this country. It is an obscenity and has to be resisted. How the Labour Party Government could even contemplate selling it or other vital State assets is beyond me.

See this speech in context