Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----and I have the right to speak here through the Chair, the upper limit on how much land will be acquired has not been absolutely and definitely defined. Who knows how much land will be acquired and it will have the effect of displacing farmers from farming activity. It is on that basis that we absolutely oppose it. In other words, this entity is hell-bent on acquiring as much land as it can grab and right now, neither the Irish taxpayer nor the Government has any say or control whatsoever. The Government was asleep at the wheel on this one. It would not have happened on anybody else's watch within this House. The Government let it happen and did not put a halt to it and it now seems that it is signed, sealed and delivered. It is an awful travesty that we would facilitate in this country a situation where a financial house from the UK could come in and acquire so much Irish land or have the potential to do so. It will walk away with the premia, let there no doubt about it. The foresters are the people I feel sorry for in all of this, because they will end up being price-takers even though we know they plant all of the forestry in this country at present. Once you start acquiring more land, you start acquiring control of the means of production and once you start controlling this, then you can set the price. Before we know it, private foresters will end up being price-takers and many of them will become enslaved to this new entity. That is the danger I fear around what is being created here. It is a beast over which there will be no control.

The dubious assertions of the Ministers, Deputies McConalogue and Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, that Coillte is needed to reach the 8,000 ha afforestation targets, may be true. I do not think anybody would argue against that but it is a fallacy to assert that the creation of this Gresham House-Coillte entity is the way forward to achieve the 8,000 ha afforestation targets. We know the national afforestation programme is carried out each year by the private forestry sector. Here you have a Labour Party Deputy standing up in defence of the private forestry sector because we see chapter and verse what it is doing on the ground in terms of putting plants into the ground and how they are trying to manage against the teeth of a forestry service that is, quite frankly, not fit for purpose. The metrics are proof of that because only 4,779 ha have been approved for planting but 44,766 ha have been approved for felling. We are cutting down more trees than we are planting in this country, and it pains me to say it, on the Green Party's watch. That is the sad reality of it. The facts speak for themselves. If you read the dashboard that everybody reads, which is the stated documentation that everybody agrees is the industry standard-----

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