Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Harkin. I thank Deputy Martin Kenny for bringing this Bill forward as it is worth debating. We must decide what kind of system we are going to have. Will we have a system with the councils or have the joke of a system that we have at the moment right around this country? The Government talks about forestry but we do not have forestry in Ireland at the moment. I will give the Minister of State a statistic. Some 25,000 tonnes of timber logs have been imported from Scotland in the last month. That is a fact. That is the same as 200 ha of fully-grown timber coming into Ireland. That is happening because the system here has just failed everybody.

Since 2010, the Department has never hit a target. Between 2016 and 2020, it only hit 56% of its so-called climate change targets under forestry. The show goes on, the joke goes on, and 12,000 jobs are being lost. The target number of felling licences to be issued in August was 75 and we achieved 56. In September, it was 120 and we achieved 60. We will be lucky if we get 2,000 ha done this year.

Deputy Kenny introduced a Bill about septic tanks for one-off rural housing, which I support. If someone applies to a rural local authority for planning permission, it can do an EIA and screen things out. At the moment, applications are going into the Department and I do not know what it is doing with them. Maybe the officials are making little paper planes out of them and flying them across to each other but they are there for a year or two and some of them are there for four or five.

I was not going to bring up the Mackinnon report but the Minister of State mentioned it and spoke about what Jim Mackinnon said. On 13 October, Deputy Sherlock asked if the Government was going to implement the Mackinnon report. We have documentation that shows the former Minister, Deputy Creed, had the procurement done to appoint a person, whose name we knew. The procurement document was put together by the former Minister of State, Andrew Doyle, and the then Minister, Deputy Creed. At the moment, there is no Minister in control of forestry. The same people have been at the same thing for the last ten years. If I was involved in the job, I would have left it because I would be ashamed of the results we have had. In its answer to Deputy Sherlock, the Department said that the chairperson will look at the feasibility of implementing the Mackinnon report. I am not blaming the Minister of State or any other Minister for this because none of them are in the job long enough to be blamed. The Department is saying it will keep control of forestry. The politicians will come and go and the Department will do what it wants. We should not be talking about broadleaf or narrow leaf, spruce or biodiversity, because this circus has gone on too long and no one can shout stop. All I am saying is that we should be allowed decide whether permission is sought through a planning authority. In fairness to every planning authority in this country, if one of them is beside a designated area or within 20 km of it, it is the appropriate authority to screen something out. The planning authorities do it for houses day in, day out.

I do not know about all the other box-ticking exercises because the applications for forestry licences are so complicated now, one would want about ten people ticking boxes. There is one drop-down box where, if it is ticked wrong, 600 more questions come up. That is how we have made them, to make sure we slow everything down.

The timber is coming in now. Timber is going to come in from Germany and Paddy in Ireland will be looking at the trees growing with no money in his pocket and the timber coming in as per usual. The same is happening with the peat we are bringing in through Drogheda for mushroom compost. That is the Ireland we live in now. This is green Ireland, the great Ireland and great environment we are going to create. I do not see any reason this Bill cannot go to a committee where we can tear it apart and flitter it but we need to do something. We have no forestry programme in this country because we have closed our eyes and constantly believed the Department was going to do this, that and the other for four or five years. I am not blaming Ministers for this but by Jesus, if we do not cop on, soon we will not have any industry in this country. Some poor devils with payments of €200,000 a year are about to lose their machines.

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