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

I also want to mention the students of Coláiste Éinde in Galway, because they get it, in asking for the forest of the children, foraois na bpáistí, initiative of planting a native broadleaf tree for every child in the country.

Monty Python came to mind for many reasons when I was thinking about this debate, partly, because we just keep going around in circles in a debate that has been going on for years and we are witnessing the sort of slow train crash of the Irish forestry sector, but also partly, because when you think about forestry, it reminds you of that scene in "The Life of Brian" where they ask what the Romans ever did for us, and then list all the things the Romans did. They gave us the roads and the aqueducts. What has forestry ever done for us? It gives us the air that we breathe, sequesters the carbon, filters the water, regulates the weather, provides a place for animals to live, creates the biodiversity we need, gives us fuel if we use biomass fuel correctly and provides amenities. I could go on. In fact, forestry does everything for us. Without forestry, there would be nothing. It can help solve the existential crisis that we face in terms of the climate and it can provide jobs and a living for farmers and those working in the sector.

That is the possibility that the students in Galway and the climate protesters grasp. What is the reality of the Irish forestry sector? It is totally broken. It is a broken model of forestry. The licensing debacle is a symptom - not the cause - of a broken forestry model. Of course, it needs to be addressed. We have been talking about the ecologists and so on for years, but it runs much deeper than all of that.

In preparing for this debate, I went back to a motion that I brought to the House on 27 February 2013 to oppose the then plan to sell off the harvesting rights of Coillte, which had been agreed by the Fine Gael-Labour Government at the time. I argued for all the things that we are arguing for here, including a different forestry model, a focus on native woodland, a support for farmers applying to plant trees, and so on. It really tells a story, because at that time, the targets for afforestation were 10,000 ha to 15,000 ha a year. The objective was to get to the EU average level of 30% forest cover. Now the targets are 8,000 ha - half that - to get to 17% forest cover. This is against an actuality of around 2,500 ha being planted, woefully missing the targets, as we have every single year.

Our forest estate is one of the only forest estates in Europe that is a net carbon emitter because we have a fundamentally misconceived forestry model, which is about monoculture and exporting pulp to the UK, with 90,000 truck journeys every year blasting out carbon instead of having a forestry model that is sustainable and can create employment. To make a comparison with a country half the size of Ireland that knows how to do forestry, in Switzerland there are 100,000 people working in forestry. In Ireland, which is twice the size of Switzerland with better conditions for growing trees, we have 12,000 people working in forestry. It is fundamentally broken.

As well as the fact we need to bring in payments for farmers so they have a viable income if they plant trees as part of CAP and they do not have all of this bureaucratic nonsense to deal with, a big part of the problem is that we need to change the mandate of the State forestry company. In the past week, I discovered that while the Minister was in Glasgow and the Taoiseach was saying we are going to protect the trees and take climate action, the State forestry company was trying to sell off a forest in Enniskerry, just as it tried to do in 2013 with the entire forest estate. Only because people acted did we stop it doing so. We can go through the list of the forest sales by Coillte. The sale to Apple in Athenry is unbelievable. Coillte sold 200 ha for a data centre in Galway. It is unbelievable. In the Kilcooley Abbey Estate, 950 acres were sold by Coillte and the following day, the person who bought it for a reported €1.5 million was boasting that it was probably worth €10 million. There is something fundamentally wrong. We need to change the mandate of Coillte. We need to support the farmers in expanding the forest estate and have a fundamentally different sustainable forestry model.

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