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

There are two aspects of this. One is trying to encourage farmers to see the benefits of forestry. I am learning as I go. We need to get the message across to farmers about how the different types of agroforestry can benefit them. They need to see it as a win-win situation rather than seeing it as a competition over land use for existing farming activities. We need to educate people and promote it in a proactive way to get farmers on board. If we do, it will be a win-win.

On Coillte, we need to think about moving beyond the industrialised single-species approach to afforestation because the most effective climate-mitigating species are the native broadleaf species. They have deeper roots and are much better at all levels - better for carbon sequestration, better for the land and so on. However, Coillte has not delivered significantly in this area. Mr. Colm McCarthy estimated that Coillte has about 500,000 acres of land that it did not deem commercially viable for forestry.

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