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

Despite having the best conditions in Europe for growing trees, we have a totally dysfunctional forestry model in this country, and that has not changed in the 11 years I have been a Deputy. I do not claim to be an expert on forestry, but my interest was piqued beyond a general interest in forests as just being beautiful places before that when, in 2013, the Government of the day agreed with the troika to sell the harvesting rights of Coillte's entire forest estate. At the time, I tabled what was the first Private Member's motion on forestry to the House - it was possibly the only such motion tabled in that Dáil - as part of the campaign to prevent the agreed sell-off of Coillte's harvesting rights to, most likely, an entity called the International Forestry Fund, which at the time was fronted by the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and was operating from a little office in Eblana Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, where the main financiers behind it were a crowd called Helvetica Wealth Management Partners, a Swiss wealth asset management operation. The plan was to go from the fairly dysfunctional Coillte model of planting Sitka spruce, which was commercially driven and was experiencing consistent failure to achieve afforestation targets, to simply the wholesale privatisation of forests.

The large protests we held at the time were successful. We mobilised huge protests in Rathdrum, Avondale and elsewhere throughout the country and, as a result, the then Government abandoned the agreed plan in the memorandum of understanding with the troika to sell off the harvesting rights, which was an important victory. Sadly, however, while that should have prompted a fundamental rethinking of the forestry model, to move it away from that sort of corporatised focus with an industrial forest model based on Sitka spruce and monocultures, demonstrating a failure to take advantage of the climatic conditions in this country to develop Irish forestry, things have remained much the same for the interceding 11 years. Despite often reasonable rhetoric, promises of change and promises to hit increased afforestation targets and to move away from the industrial monocultural model, we heard recently that there is a plan for Coillte to team up with Gresham House Asset Management, an investment fund, to advance afforestation in Ireland.

That says it all. Coillte has been operating a largely for-profit venture, albeit with some decorative nods to the idea of getting back to developing native woodlands, diversifying Ireland’s forest estate, developing a sustainable forest model and acting generally as the guardians of the forest estate. Instead it is teaming up with an international investment fund to compete with farmers rather than support them, as its role should be. It is going to compete with them and, potentially, run them out of business, making it even more difficult for them to engage in forestry, when we should be doing precisely the opposite. This is happening to the extent that we are thoroughly discrediting the entire project of afforestation in the minds of many in rural Ireland, who might be interested in forestry if they were supported and if Coillte saw its role not as one operating as a dominant, business-corporate force competing with the small farmer but rather as one that would support them, and also as one that operates as the guardian of the forest estate, and it seems as though nothing has changed in that regard.

We hear about some moves to transition the monocultural plantations of Coillte to more diverse native woodlands, but how much of that is happening? When we think about the campaign we had to have recently with Killegar Wood in Enniskerry, where Coillte had planned, quietly, to sell off a forest to whomever, we wonder what is really going on in Coillte and what its agenda is. Indeed, given that 57.7% of the personnel involved in the forest policy group that formed Project Woodland come from a commercial background, we again get a sense of the Government not understanding that we need dramatically to change our forestry model whereby, in particular, Coillte would have a role as the guardian of the forest estate while simultaneously supporting small farmers. If we want farmers to move into forestry and to assist us in climate action and in enhancing biodiversity, we genuinely have to support them, engage with them and listen to them.

Simultaneously, Coillte's fundamental mandate has to change from the one it is currently operating. I suspect, sadly, that we are still a long way from that.

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