Senator Pippa Hackett:

I thank the Deputy for his kind words. The Mackinnon report did, indeed, highlight that lack of political priority for forestry. It is something of which I am very aware. We are missing our afforestation targets by a long way. The commitments in the programme for Government were highly ambitious for forestry, far more so than any previous programme. I am really looking forward to getting my forestry implementation group off the ground and starting the process of devising a new forestry programme for Ireland. It will be done with stakeholder engagement and as broad a base as we can achieve. We see the difficulty certain communities have with broad-scale single species afforestation. Those are some of the issues I wish to address. I look forward to engagement with politicians as well as stakeholders in devising that.

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