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

As I stated, in Wallonia it is worth €4.5 billion. We are massively underperforming in terms of the employment and revenue we could generate if we had a good and sustainable forestry model instead of the monocultural industrial forestry model that may result in net deforestation. As the model is largely based on one species of tree, it is quite damaging to soil and water. As it makes our forests more prone to disease and so on, it is a fundamentally unsustainable industry.

It may also be worth pointing out that this industry does not generate quality employment. For example, when Coillte was set up in 1989, there were 2,500 staff in the forest service but today there are 600, with half of those being administrative staff. The people getting jobs in forestry are often poorly paid. It can be immigrant labour with very insecure work that does not amount to a job at all. Bogus self-employment is rampant, with worker rights, pay and conditions subject to widespread abuse. It is not a sustainable or beneficial forestry model from an employment perspective, a macroeconomic perspective and a biodiversity perspective.

Against that background is the idea that we will try to restrict the right of people to object to planting or felling that is contributing to sustaining or propping up an unsustainable forestry model. That is not acceptable as far as I am concerned. We need a thoroughly independent review of the entire forestry sector rather than something that is trying essentially to cover the tracks of a failed policy.

If we did forestry right we could create thousands of new, decent and quality jobs. It could be a forestry model based on diverse forest species, native woodlands and tree species that would generate all sorts of knock-on industries from a different type of forestry. It is a shocking fact that in a country where we were once covered with native hardwood trees, there is almost no native hardwood industry at all and we import much of our hardwood. It is shocking when we have supreme conditions for growing quality hardwood trees but it is not the short-term profit model favoured by pension funds, sawmills and the big corporate interests who dominate Irish forestry. It would nevertheless have a genuine benefit on the environment, employment, the economy and real communities with ordinary working people. It would of course also contribute to addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis, as we must.

On this basis, we will oppose the Bill. We have tabled a number of amendments, most of which have been suggested by environmental groups, which should give the Green Party pause for thought in its support for the Bill. Those groups have described the Bill as shocking and the Green Party would have worked with these people closely. Perhaps its Deputies will explain why many of the people they have campaigned and worked with over many years believe this Bill to be retrograde and in need of being radically amended. It is not the legislation we need to develop an environmentally sustainable and genuinely economically beneficial forestry sector in this country.

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