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

I welcome this debate. I also welcome the Minister and the Minister of State. I have lost count of the number of discussions and debates in which I have participated in this House, and at committees and elsewhere, in respect of Ireland's forestry policy and its underlying failures. I have often said that a good forestry strategy is one that will deliver for the environment, our local communities and the economy. Unfortunately, we have had a worsening situation over the past decade or so, whereby none of those objectives have been met. In fact, the situation has got worse over the past couple of years.

If I welcome anything over the past number of weeks arising from the Gresham House deal that Coillte has engaged in, it is that it has finally put a spotlight on those failures. This is now a matter of public discourse. In my time in politics, I have rarely seen an issue that has united so many facets of Irish life, that has been the talk of so many different arenas, and that has angered and frustrated so many different people. The deal that Coillte engaged in with Gresham House has been roundly and rightly condemned by environmentalists, farmers, local communities and virtually anybody who has uttered an opinion in this House and outside it. It crystallises the underlying inability of the Minister, the Ministers of State and their Department to get this issue right.

The Gresham House deal, despite what we were asked to believe in the opening days of this debacle, was not something that came as a shot out of the blue for the Government. This deal was essentially signed off on by the Government. It would not have been possible were it not for a letter of expectation issued by the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, to Coillte in June of last year. I believe that happened as a result of negotiations and discussions with Coillte. The Minister's defence of that was we should have realised that this was what Coillte were planning to do because we received briefings from it.

I have met with Coillte a number of times, seen its broad strategy, discussed with it some of the detail and asked it how it wants to achieve this. Coillte has never suggested to me, in private conversations or in public briefings, that the route it saw was through an engagement with the type of investment fund Gresham House represents.

The letter of expectation directed Coillte to develop initiatives that included participation in a subsidiary or partnership enterprise. It is clear that the letter directed Coillte towards this fund. There has been an attempt by the Ministers over recent days to minimise this. One of the figures they keep citing is that the deal represents only 1% of the overall ambition, but we know that what it will represent is a purchase of 12,000 ha, 8,500 ha of which is already afforested. The Ministers still have not explained what possible benefit to the Irish people there is in having land that is already afforested and in local ownership transferred to the ownership of a huge foreign investment fund. The 3,500 ha over five years represents 700 ha per year. If we were to set that against what was actually planted last year, far from 1% or 3.5%, it would represent more than a third of all trees planted in a given year. The Minister, I had thought and hoped, would have taken the opportunity today to indicate that he plans to issue a new shareholder letter of expectation to Coillte to instruct it not to proceed with any of these types of deals in the future. From our discussions last night, we have learned that there are ways in which the Minister can ensure that the Gresham House deal does not proceed. The first thing he could do is tell Coillte not to put €10 million of public funding into the project but instead use that money to purchase publicly owned land. The second thing the Minister could do is issue a public pronouncement encouraging investors not to put their money into the Gresham House deal because if Gresham House cannot pull together the €200 million, this deal will fall apart.

The really disgusting thing that has happened is that for all the pronouncements we have all heard on our local radio stations and all the rest of it, we had an opportunity to send a very clear message through the Private Members' motion that was before us last night. Unbelievably and bizarrely, but probably not surprisingly, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party Deputies abstained. For all the bluff and the bluster, when it came to it they would not support a motion that very clearly called on Coillte to stop the deal with Gresham House.

Now all the failures of forestry policy that have been ongoing for so long have been exposed. In 2004, as has rightly been said, a state aid ruling essentially meant that Coillte could not draw down the premiums and grants in respect of forestry and removed Coillte from the market. Very quickly after that, however, the market recovered to such a point that in 2010, six years later, we were hitting more than 8,000 ha per year in afforestation. There will rightly be debates about the types and locations of that afforestation, the impact it had on our biodiversity crisis, which many would argue was worsened as a result of that policy, and the fact that to some degree we managed to create a forestry policy whereby, by planting trees on bogland, we became one of the only countries in the world that made forestry actually damaging and carbon-emitting as opposed to something beneficial to the environment. However, we planted over 8,000 ha per year. That means there is a model in place by which this could be delivered, and the model was working in partnership with farmers, in particular. It was subsequent to that that the market moved and, through Government policy, investment funds were encouraged to come in and purchase large swathes of land in order to be able to draw down the premiums for which they were not excluded. We see the devastating impact that that has had in places like Leitrim, west Cavan and west Kerry. From 2010 the number of hectares each year being afforested steadily declined. Aside from the fact that we now had these new investment-type models coming in on a private basis, the numbers went down, up to and including in 2017, when the court ruling to which the Minister refers had a huge impact on the licensing process.

What did the Government do after that? In 2019 it commissioned the Mackinnon report. It was delivered in December 2019, and in January of the following year, 2020, the Department issued the draft implementation plan of the report. In November 2020, almost a full year later, it appointed Jo O'Hara to advise on the implementation and she delivered the implementation of the Mackinnon report in February 2021, whereby Project Woodland was established. Project Woodland went on to commission a series of specific reviews. I have lost count of the number of reviews and reports the Department has carried out. Not to be outdone, we on the Oireachtas agriculture committee got involved in the process and commissioned a report. I would safely say that if we were to stack all the reports relating to forestry that have been received since August 2019 on the floor of the Dáil, they would hit its high ceiling. The problem, then, is not the lack of resources, a lack of reports or a lack of ideas; it is the lack of political will to actually implement them. We have known since, aside from the licensing issues, why farmers disengage because they have been quite upfront in telling us. The licensing debacles were an issue. Farmers who a generation ago planted trees and forests and then came to the point where they were actually felling them ended up finding themselves with four- or five-year delays before the felling licences were provided. We know that the issue of ash dieback has never been dealt with effectively. Farmers, through no fault of their own, albeit arguably through the fault of the Department for having allowed ash dieback to enter the country in the first place, saw their entire investments completely destroyed. The Government in large part told them it was their own loss. Then, when they did intervene, they did so in a way that was not anywhere close to what needed to be done.

Here we are, then, in January 2022, and here is what some people might not realise. People who own land, whether public, private or community-owned, and who decide they want to play their part and want to plant trees today cannot apply to do that. They cannot submit a licence. The Minister says "We do not have a day to waste" in getting this programme through. He forgot to say that the application has not been submitted, so we have not a day to waste in getting this application through but the application itself has not been submitted, and we hear reports that the European Commission has some very serious concerns about that programme.

What, then, needs to happen? We need to start engaging with the sector. The first thing we need to do in order to build goodwill is to do precisely what we have asked in respect of Coillte. A new letter of expectation needs to issue to Coillte telling it that no more of these deals will be tolerated by the Government. Second, we need to try to scupper the current Gresham House deal. That is certainly within the mechanisms. The third thing we need to do is get clarification on the state aid rules. As I said last night, my understanding is that it might be possible for Coillte and other public bodies to avail of premiums and grants. If that is the case, it would be not only unacceptable but a national scandal if, instead of doing that, Coillte were to put its funds into a private investment fund in order to purchase land. There is an organisation called Social, Economic Environmental Forestry Association of Ireland, SEEFA, that represents upwards of 85% of the forestry sector. Despite being asked several times, the Minister has not committed to meeting the association. I would have thought that that would be a good first step. In respect of the licensing programmes, and despite what has already been said, there is a target of 100 licences per week. Essentially, that is the target the Government has set to achieve. It achieved it in 18 weeks last week; it was 19 the year before. While the overall number of licences issued increased, there are still delays.

I am running out of time but I will finish on two remarks the Ministers have made in recent days. They go to the heart of the dichotomy we have and the divergence of views.

The Minister of State, Senator Hackett, said: "This is a hugely exciting time for Irish forestry, and we have designed a Forestry Programme that will deliver for climate, for biodiversity and for our farmers." The Minister, Deputy McConalogue, decided to outdo her and said we were at the dawn of a brilliant, bright and exciting future for forestry. One forester who rang me last night described the current situation as the darkest hour in Irish forestry in that person's 25 years in the sector. That is the dichotomy.

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