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

For example, why have so many harvesting rights been sold by Coillte in recent years? Was there a tendering process in each of those cases, as required under EU law? What conditions applied to those sales? These are serious questions, particularly given that one of the main beneficiaries of those sales was the Irish Forestry Unit Trust, which consists of Bank of Ireland, AIB and Irish Life. We know that banks like the Chinese state bank, the Swiss banks and possibly the Irish banks are lining up to take over our State forests. The Minister referred to the planting of 7,000 ha, but the forest strategy says we should be planting 25,000 ha.

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