Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

What I will say about this motion, however, is that I welcome that we are discussing forestry and the role of Coillte more generally here this evening. In the context of Coillte’s further direction, it is important to mention first a key constraint on Coillte’s ability to engage in afforestation without private involvement, namely, EU state aid rules.

A 2003 EU state aid decision ruled that Coillte, as a public authority, could not receive state aid in the form of annual forestry premium payments. Our officials in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine are assessing the extent to which the State might be able to fund Coillte’s afforestation efforts directly, either through capital funding or through grant and premium payments under the new forestry programme, without breaching new state aid guidelines adopted on 1 January this year.

More broadly, though, this is a timely debate. We are shortly moving to phase 2 of the land use review and among other things, this will look at how we can further streamline the forestry licensing process by adopting a plan-based approach. Among the bigger land use questions we have to tackle is the question of what we as a State want from Coillte and where its focus should lie. Coillte, under its existing commercial mandate, has committed to a 50:50 split between forests for nature and forests for wood and I believe this represents real progress from a place where Coillte traditionally had an 80:20 split in favour of forests for wood. Certainly, my own party was clear in its general election manifesto in 2020 that we should look at a broader mandate for Coillte, which would deliver multiple benefits, including environmental and community objectives, as well as the production of high-quality timber and this remains our position. I will continue to pursue this with my Government colleagues.

I have always wanted a broader mandate for Coillte and if this debate can bring that forward, it will be a good result. I note the Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss discussed Coillte over the weekend and made a similar draft recommendation. I look forward to examining the final recommendations of the citizens' assembly when they come to Government and to exploring the merits of those recommendations with my coalition colleagues. I understand that the citizens’ assembly also expressed a concern that the Irish Strategic Forestry Fund should not result in the sale of any existing Coillte forests and I can categorically say that is not on the cards.

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