Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will support Deputy Fitzmaurice's amendment, which seeks to provide that eight weeks would be a sufficient period in which a decision on a felling licence could be made.

That is laudable and deserves praise. I do not know if that includes a stipulation that five weeks should be allowed for the appellant to make the appeal or a submission. That should be part of it as well in the same way it is for a planning application for a house or for the biggest commercial venture ever thought of. Those are the rules that the local authorities insist on in those scenarios and they have worked fine in thousands and maybe millions of applications.

I have to say to Deputy Boyd Barrett that I respect him an awful lot. He does an awful lot of talking and good work but he has gone off the rails this evening and he is off the track. It is a good job that he is elected here and that he has a salary out of Dáil Éireann because if he did not, he would not make a living out of forestry anyway. I can guarantee him that because he just does not know what he is talking about.

Many of the forests we are talking about are being cut down for the third time. They were planted back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were cut down 30 years after that and they were cut down 25 or 30 years after that again because they grow quicker the second time as there is more vegetation. It is a recognised fact that forests grow quicker the second time and even the third time. I can even point out one forest in Kilgarvan to the Deputy that has been planted three times and one little patch of it has been cut. My father worked there in the early 1950s with a spade and a shovel and that is where he learned to drive a bulldozer as well.

The owners of these forests had no problem in getting the felling licences the first two times. It is only at this stage, and I am going back about two years, that these blackguards started appealing the applications for felling licences. When landowners, Coillte or whoever planted their forests and got grants for same, they should have had a fair presumption that they would be allowed to cut them down. It is wrong of anyone here, there or anywhere to suggest that the people who own those plantations would be denied the right to cut them down. There are other natural trees in different places and they are a different story altogether. These were plantations that had to be planted and fenced to get the grant. These poor people, entities, companies or whatever all have to pay their way.

Deputy Boyd Barrett suggested giving the landowners funding while they are held up. Who is going to do that? This Government does not have money to pay for home help or to give elderly people the right to stay in their homes as long as they possibly can. I suppose Deputy Boyd Barrett does not know that if a person has a place planted, receives a felling licence and then cuts it down, he or she cannot reclaim the land and try to make it arable. If the person wanted to do that, the only way to do so is to plant another place of equal size. Those rules exist and Deputy Boyd Barrett need have no fear in the world about that.

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