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

We will be opposing this Bill for a number of reasons. First, the manner in which this Bill is being pushed through is a disgrace. Even at this point, we are scrambling around and trying to get our heads around huge numbers of amendments, which will never be debated and discussed in any event. All of those amendments have been collapsed into the Second Stage debate and the legislation will be rammed through in a way that makes a mockery of legislative scrutiny and the democratic process.

The fact the Green Party is a party to this is shocking beyond belief because I do not know how many times I heard members of the Green Party wax lyrical about the need for a sustainable forestry model and the critical importance of forestry in terms of climate change and biodiversity. Yet, it is assisting the bigger parties in the Government in ramming through this Bill, which will not address the huge crisis we face in a fundamentally dysfunctional forestry model and which could do significant damage.

Aside from almost anything that is in the Bill, the process is a disgrace. That is a good enough reason to oppose this Bill because we will not have time to properly scrutinise it. Then we must consider what the Bill is facilitating, namely, the propping up of a rotten, dysfunctional and environmentally damaging forestry model. This model is driven by profit and that does not even come close to reaching the economic and employment potential that a proper forestry model would have.

We are propping up a forestry model that is carrying out intense environmental damage. To give an indication of why I say that, in one day in 2019, some 824 separate felling licences were issued to clear 6,669 ha of public forest. Over the next three months, a further 345 more felling licences up to December 2019, covering a total of 9,527 ha of public forest were issued. Many of those might be subject to appeal. We should think about those figures. That is 15,000 ha of public forest that will be felled and that is just in the period of about half of last year. Many of those fellings could cause potentially significant environmental damage and be subject to appeal. Those figures are telling when one considers that we are planting about 4,000 ha of forest per year and for the most part, it is the wrong type of forest. In a short period of time, licences seeking to fell 15,000 ha were issued but we are only planting 4,000 ha.

The Irish National Council for Forest Research and Development, COFORD, has talked about us reaching our afforestation targets and getting from the abysmal level of forest cover, which has been mentioned a number of times, of 11% as against a European average of 30%, in a country that has the best conditions for growing trees anywhere in Europe and we have consistently gotten nowhere near those targets. When one adds together what I have just said and what we are planting against a push for accelerated harvesting, it is not surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, among others has expressed deep concern that we may be in a situation of net deforestation. We are going from an already bad situation to a worse situation, therefore.

I had some lobbying from some of my colleagues earlier who legitimately worry about the people who move the logs, the hauliers and so on, and those who participate in the work of cutting down trees or planting forests. Those concerns for employment and for people who earn their living from forestry are legitimate but I ask those colleagues to consider that in Wallonia, which is a quarter of the territory of Belgium, there is a timber industry worth €4.5 billion employing 18,000 people. In other words, in an area much smaller than this country, they have far more people employed in forestry and the revenue is far greater. There are 12,000 people employed in Irish forestry.

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