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

My question follows directly on from Deputy Moynihan's. I will ask about the forestry programme. In a document I helped leak, and that the Government had not put out, from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Environment, our draft forestry programme was rejected on the basis that it was not doing biodiversity. It very specifically referred to Coillte and the predominance of the Sitka spruce monocultural forestry model. I do not even know where that is at. Have we redrafted it? When will we see it? It raises a big issue. If we are, as we must, to do a sustainable, diverse form of afforestation and enhance biodiversity, the Government will have to pay farmers. It has to make it worth their while in order to get them on board so that they do not feel threatened and lose out by the absolutely necessary restoration of biodiversity, and meeting of our afforestation targets, with a new forestry model that replaces the disaster of the monocultural Sitka model.

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