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

I move amendment No. 13:

In page 8, between lines 31 and 32, to insert the following:"(o) to promote silviculture based on natural conditions using continuous cover forest planning and management using native species adapted to the site, having small scale operations and by encouraging natural regeneration, ensuring the protection of rare, endangered, and ecologically important areas while maintaining, conserving and enhancing biological diversity in forest ecosystems;".

I have made many of the arguments already for what I propose in this amendment and I will not labour the point. As in the case of many of the amendments I submitted, I stress in respect of this amendment the need to develop our native organic forestry which has been massively depleted in favour of deforestation, in the first instance, and in so far as we have started to recover forestry in Ireland, it has been too focused on an industrial and monocultural module and too narrowly focused on the idea of developing its economic potential. This amendment proposes a different model and approach which recognises the multiple values - the environmental value but also the economic, social and cultural value of recovering and regenerating our native species and woodlands.

The Minister of State in his last response spoke about wanting to encourage people to take up forestry and to use land that is not being used for other purposes, and I agree with him completely on that point.

I do not want to do anything to discourage this. What we need to do is create an understanding among people of a slightly broader view of what the forestry sector can be and how, if we embrace and develop that broader concept, everybody can be a winner, including the environmentalists, farmers, the economy, rural communities and even urban communities which should also develop forestry. Everybody can be a winner in terms of job creation and the development of much more community-based forest-related industries rather than industrial processes and so on. That is the thrust of many of my amendments, including this one.

The value of forestry has not been fully grasped. When the case in this regard is presented, people immediately see the value of it. This was evident in the huge outpouring of concern about sale of Coillte's harvesting rights. When people thought about it, they came to the view that our native forests were important to us but that we did not think about them most of the time. The more one thinks about and understands forestry, as I have come to do in the past year or two, one realises we are not getting it right. We need to radically shift what we are doing if we are to make forestry sustainable and develop its enormous economic potential. It will take a more holistic view of forestry to develop that potential.

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