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

We will support the amendments insofar as they seek to facilitate planting of native trees on small parcels of land and provide for schemes to be set up to allow that to happen relatively easily. However, as others have said, there is concern about the way this has been sprung on people and the lack of consultation with stakeholders who are concerned with forestry, including those in the industry and environmentalists. I have my sources in forestry and they usually contact me if anything is moving. They have not heard any word of this and they are on top of everything. That is a problem and there are concerns about it.

As others have said, measures like this cannot be used to camouflage our failures in other areas or to substitute for the necessary action that needs to take place in other areas where we are failing. The backlog in the issuing of licences has been mentioned as a major concern. Net deforestation may take place in the country, as suggested by the greater number of felling licences being issued compared with a fraction of that for afforestation licences. A few years ago, the EPA signalled that it believed there was a danger of net deforestation because felling was happening essentially dictated by market concerns rather than by the best stewardship and guardianship of forestry.

I recently flagged another concern with the threatened sale of Killegar Forest near Enniskerry, from which I am glad Coillte backed off. However, it posed very serious questions. I subsequently tabled parliamentary questions trying to understand what on earth possessed Coillte to imagine that it might be a good idea to sell an amenity forest when we are supposed to be meeting climate and biodiversity targets. There was a similar threat to a forest close to Kinsale, County Cork.

Coillte is carrying out significant sales on an ongoing basis. That is linked to the mandate of Coillte, which at one level we are told is trying to pivot towards biodiversity and so on, but in reality much of what it does is about clear-felling and then replanting 90% to 95% with Sitka spruce, perpetuating a failed forestry model and not doing much in the way of active afforestation. Against that background, its selling of amenity forests makes no sense and suggests something is fundamentally wrong with the mandate of Coillte, it being operated on a sort of commercial basis.

The other issue, which relates to Deputy Cahill's point, is that I would like to think we could break from the Sitka spruce industrial forestry model. If we are to do that, which I think we have to for climate, biodiversity and all sorts of reasons, it must also be a new forestry model that delivers a decent living for farmers engaged in forestry which at the moment many feel can only be delivered by the Sitka spruce monocultural model. We need to break from that, while also giving real supports to farmers to do so.

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