Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Fair enough. I hope it is not because the Minister believes rewilding is not a serious proposition and a serious part of what we need to do, because it is central to our future forestry plans.

Our legacy from the past 50 years comprises all the plantations that will give our mills and all the industry we have set up a supply, but we must move away from the monoculture plantation system. We must be especially wary about the prospect of bioenergy providing a viable long-term solution because it does not result in the effective storage of carbon. I am coming back to the same argument I have had with the Minister on a number of occasions. We need a national land use plan to map out the new change, the new future, for Irish woodlands. Beneath that, we need county and local area plans to work out the best applications in various types of lands and various types of farms and woodland that go hand in hand with the rewilding we are to engage in. We need to change the premiums we pay to support this change in the whole model. We need to use Common Agricultural Policy reform to pay farmers properly for some of the rewilding we are going to do. First and foremost, we need to fund the National Biodiversity Data Centre, which is hanging on a thread because it does not have proper funding from the Government. We need to expand the National Parks and Wildlife Service and COFORD to make sure we have the scientific expertise to help local communities to develop the new forestry model.

We need to change the mandate for Coillte and Bord na Móna. Coillte, in particular, must move away from being a company that is mandated to maximise commercial returns from lumber production. It must be charged again with planting all over this country. It should be helping communities to plant for biodiversity and for better water quality. It should see forestry as a natural resource for our people and as something that helps our tourism industry. Coillte should be looking at the production of food and the provision of a whole range of services out of forestry. This is the change that needs to happen. There needs to be a fundamental reappraisal of what we are doing in forestry. If we move towards supporting nature, it will bring us closer to nature and will give us a natural landscape that we cherish and our children and grandchildren will cherish. That is where we want to go with this motion. That is why we have tabled it. We think it is very significant for our climate crisis, for our biodiversity crisis and for the revival of rural Ireland. More than anything else, the land use plan must start with people. Foresters, woodworkers and others who will benefit from this forestry system are willing to make the massive change that is needed.

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