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

An issue in respect of which I - no more than anybody else - have tabled hundreds of parliamentary questions since I entered the Dáil in 2011, is forestry. Those questions date right back to the misguided plan to sell off the harvesting rights of Coillte. In the interim, there has been, at a rhetorical level, an improvement in terms of the Government's official policy on forestry, particularly its importance in the context of climate change. However, in terms of delivery, we are in a worse position than we have ever been. The rate of new planting actually got worse over the past six years, as did the situation in terms of the type of trees we grow, namely, one species, Sitka spruce. The forestry sector is commercially focused rather than based on understanding the need for a sustainable model that would contribute to a sustainable environmental future. The Mackinnon report that was produced recently confirmed some of the points that I and others have been making about this matter for a long time. We are not taking forestry seriously. Will anything improve on this front? We have a target to plant 8,000 ha of trees. We have had targets similar to this or even higher in the past ten years. We never meet them and we are now down at an all-time low of approximately 3,000 ha a year, which is dismal. Will we move from paying rhetorical lip service to forestry and climate change to real delivery in terms of afforestation?

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