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

The logic pursued by the supporters of the Bill is rush, rush, rush. It is a dangerous rush and it is one that may well lead to people cutting off their nose to spite their face. I fully understand the anxiety, concern and pressure among small farmers who invested in forestry and who feel the need to gain a return on that investment. They should certainly be supported, as should people who rely for an income on forestry and investments they made in that regard.

If, however, proper oversight of the impact of the felling of forests or the planting of the wrong types of forests is thrown out, it will ultimately damage not just the environment but also the conditions, the soil and the environment that allows a living to be made and employment gained. Of course we need to speed up the appeals process but we have to remember what we are we dealing with. I understand Deputy Michael Healy-Rae's analogy, and this is not a criticism of him, but building a house, with all the objections and the planning permission that go with it, is one thing; a forest is very different, and particularly a large one. It has huge implications for the stability of the soil and the mountains, which forests keep up, and for ensuring there is not dangerous, poisonous run-off that affects water and so on.

I do not want to overstate this but it cannot be overstated. Take, for example, Derrybrien and what happened there because a proper environmental impact assessment had not been carried out. We are still paying the price as a State. The damage was done because a proper environmental impact assessment had not been carried out. In the broader scope of history, however, the issue is even more significant. The truth is that places such as Iraq or huge parts of Greece that are now deserts were not always deserts. They became deserts because the trees were cut down, and the trees were where moisture gathered. The environment there was destroyed, with a short-term objective of felling wood, and in achieving a certain objective, the conditions in which the people made a living were destroyed. The lowlands below them were destroyed too, as a result of the damage done to the sides of mountains and so on when trees were being cut down.

These are serious matters. It is not that some sort of vexatious objector is concerned about them; they have real implications for farmers, rural Ireland, the stability of soil, the quality of water and our wider environment. That is the nub of the debate on this. We should speed up the appeals process but qualified people who know what they are talking about should assess the applications and what the consequences might be. That means beefing up the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the forest service with jobs for people who have the skills, such as ecologists, who can process these matters properly, and not just because we are in a rush to get it done. If that means there is some delay, the farmer should certainly be compensated. Let us not set good ecological and forest management against the farmer, nor make them enemies of each other. Farmers should be compensated and supported.

Nevertheless, we must bear in mind what I mentioned earlier. These are facts that were given to me. Coillte last year granted 800 felling licences in one day for 6,000 ha of forest to be felled, and on another day in December, 350 licences for another 9,000 ha. That is some of the backlog. These are not small farmers; they are large plantations that can have very serious consequences. Similarly, there is the sort of planting that is alienating communities and is not doing any good. It is not creating the sustainable model we want or employment. There is not much employment in this monocultural-type forest model.

There is some employment for planting and felling but very little in between. As I pointed out earlier, a point my attention was brought to is that there are 12,000 jobs but, given the conditions for forestry that exist in this country, there should be a hell of a lot more. It should be generating a hell of a lot more revenue. The forestry model in many other countries throughout the world, on the same or less land, generates many more jobs and much more revenue because they have a proper forest model, or a better one, than what we have. Simply processing all these appeals rapidly, without properly doing the necessary assessments and ensuring we are making the correct decisions, with properly qualified people looking at those appeals, is a mistake that will ultimately damage farmers and rural Ireland and will not help us move towards the sustainable and better forest model we need. It will have the opposite impact.

I had intended to read out the following earlier. It is such a brilliant quote from a surprising source and it puts the whole debate in historical context. It is from Friedrich Engels.

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