Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This is not something the Minister was unaware of. He was absolutely aware of it throughout the process but he kept this House, the agriculture committee, the sector and the farmers of Ireland completely in the dark. Then he comes before us and tells us there is nothing he can do and the deal is already made. It is absolute cynicism. It is the reason we have a crisis in forestry. It is the reason we are failing to reach our targets. What we have now is a deal that will see a venture owned by a British investment fund purchase thousands of hectares of Irish land. Most of that land, as the Minister of State said in defence of it, is already forested. Only 3,500 out of 12,000 ha is new afforestation. Where does that fit in to any climate action plan? This will see prices inflated beyond the reach of most family farmers. This deal will see Irish taxpayers' money, tens of millions of euro, being used to subsidise the purchase of land by a British investment company. The Ministers have cited this notion, this laughable figure that it is only 1% of the overall target. Having faced the challenges we are facing on the first 1%, what hope do we have that this Government has any prospect of reaching the further 99% that is required for us to reach our climate action targets?

Anybody looking at these investment funds and thinking this is stopping at 12,000 ha needs to have their head examined. At the moment across Britain, Gresham House owns 140,000 ha of afforestation land worth €1.8 billion. To suggest it would even contemplate coming into the Irish market for what is in the grand scheme of its operations a pittance is again laughable and does not stack up. The Ministers still not have answered the question. There has been lots of rhetoric around state aid. The Department, as the Minister acknowledged last Thursday at a briefing, has for most of the past year been in discussions with the European Commission around state aid rules. Has the Minister even once put to the Commission the question as to what he needs to do to ensure that Coillte can draw down state aid and not have to rely on a British investment firm? My belief is that the question was not even put. Has the Minister looked at the afforestation programme to see whether he can prevent millions of euro being siphoned out of the country and devise a forestry programme that goes to farmers, landowners, local communities and public bodies but not to British-held investment companies?

That would be a solution. We know how to reach the afforestation rates we need because we did it previously. In 2010, long after 2004 when Coillte was impacted by state aid rules, we matched the 8,000 ha of land being afforested. The people who did this were the farmers of Ireland. We were on the right trajectory, but due to incompetence primarily, bureaucracy-----

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