Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State for this debate on forestry. It is an ongoing debate, and has been both prior to and since she assumed the position as Minister of State with responsibility.That led to the Minister of State's predecessor, the former Minister of State, Andrew Doyle, commissioning the MacKinnon report, which the Minister of State mentioned and a copy of which I have before me.

When a Department or a Minister of State commissions a report and when it hits the public domain, the stakeholders involved are usually up in arms and saying the group was employed by the Department and the report is written in favour of the Department. I want to try to be solution-focused and solution-led. On this occasion we have all the stakeholders lobbying us to have the MacKinnon report implemented. They have welcomed it with open arms and in their minds it contains many of the solutions. I know the Minister of State has employed Jo O'Hara to try to push that along but I have the solution in this report in my hand if we could only implement it. That is where the priority needs to lie.

The MacKinnon report recommends that there would be one licence coupled with something like a management plan. When you get a licence to sow forestry, you have to come back to get a licence to thin. Then you have to get another licence for an access road and eventually you also have to get a licence to fell that forestry. No wonder there is a backlog when you need four licences for one piece of forestry. I welcome that the Minister of State has mentioned she would bring in pre-licence consultation, like a pre-planning meeting if you were applying to the council to build a house. We should let the one licence deal with the whole lot after that and incorporate into the conditions of that licence a forestry management plan which would deal with the maintenance, thinning, access road and eventual felling. Confidence in the sector and in potential future foresters is gone because of the fact we have got to this situation with the backlog in licensing. We need to rebuild and reinstate that confidence or we will never meet our targets. The programme for Government and climate action target is 8,000 ha of new forestry per year, but if we do 2,000 ha, we will be doing well.

The MacKinnon report states that there needs to be a fixed time for planning. If you put in a planning or a licence application, you should know that you will have an answer, let it be good, bad or indifferent, within a fixed time. Licensing processes are dragging on and there is no fixed time. People in the industry will tell you that 60% of people who have put in applications and who are considering sowing trees in an area of land, which is their livelihood and asset, have been waiting so long that they have formulated or proceeded with other plans and done something else with that land. By the time the licences eventually come out, they have moved on and they are lost to the system. With that in mind, I suggest the Department could do an analysis of the licences that are sitting in the backlog and contact the applicants. While we are trying to alleviate the backlog, it would be unfortunate if a lot of time, money and energy was spent working on licences which were granted only for the applicants, unknown to the Department, the officials or the people who are dealing with the licence, to have made alternative plans for their land because of their impatience and because the thing had taken so long, causing them to move on. If we could do a trawl and a weeding-out process of the backlog to see how many of the applicants are still genuinely interested, that would be one way of shortening that list in the short term.

Another issue that is coming up a lot is the lack of correlation between forestry and the environmental schemes and the inclusion of forestry within the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, system. It was a big mistake, and I hope it can be corrected soon, that nobody from the forestry side was involved in the stakeholder consultative committee in the formulation of the CAP strategic plan. This is a wrong that needs to be righted and it is to be hoped that can be addressed shortly. The major issue that has arisen with CAP is that for people who entered environmental schemes in the previous CAP, their GLAS eliminated their forestry or vice versa. They could not have both. That is reflected in the figures for forestry. Some 852 farmers planted trees in 2015 and that reduced to 100 in 2020. The people in the industry will tell you this happened because of the correlation between farmers who wanted to get into GLAS and were made to choose between the two. It was not possible for them to partake in GLAS and plant forestry. That has to be addressed and that would have been highlighted more had there been stakeholders from the forestry side on that stakeholder consultative committee.

I welcome and agree wholeheartedly with what Senator Garvey said about the Sitka spruce and the native trees. I am a lover of our native trees. Senator Garvey put it well. There needs to be a mix, but there is almost an "us and them" situation arising where people's vision of forestry is being clouded by their love of the native Irish tree and it is dominating the debate. We need the correct mix and we need Sitka spruce for its speed of growth, its sequestration qualities and the soft wood timber that should be used a lot more in our building of houses going forward.

I said I wanted to talk about potential solutions. I welcomed the Forestry (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020 that the Minister of State introduced, and I compliment her on getting it to the floors of both Houses so soon after her appointment, but we need to go that step further. As I said, the answers are in the MacKinnon report and we need to get that implemented sooner rather than later. The backlog is what it is and we do not have the colour of the amount of afforestation applications coming in. If we were getting the number of applications for licences to plant that would equate to planting 8,000 ha per year, what would the backlog be? I am not being critical in saying this but, in such circumstances, if we were not alleviating the backlog to solve the problem, then the backlog should actually be a lot bigger. That sounds like a contradictory statement, but if we were getting what we needed, we would have a serious backlog.

There are other measures that need to be looked at, including the land use change when you go into forestry, which is off-putting for a lot of people. If you plant once, you are obliged to replant when you harvest that timber and that puts a lot of people off. It scares people that because of the longevity of the project they are tying into, they will tie the hands of the next generation behind their backs. If you plant forestry and fell it, you more than likely will make the decision there and then to go back in and replant anyway, but the fact you have to sign on the dotted line and that you know you are possibly signing for your successors and the next generation puts a lot of people off.

I also ask the Minister of State to go back and look at the grants of licences. While she gave the figures for the kilometres of roads and the cubic metres of timber involved, there has to be a correlation between the two. There is no point in any of us coming in here and saying that so many licences have been granted for the felling of trees if the roads are not being permitted for those forests. There needs to be a correlation between those figures. I also refer to the time when trees can be felled. A licence that is granted today with a felling date of 2023 will not help the immediate crisis we find ourselves in.

We are all in this together. We need to reach the afforestation target of 8,000 ha per year but the biggest problem we have in reaching that is getting the people to come with us. It is like what the Minister of State said earlier. If you want to go somewhere fast, you go on your own, but if you want to bring the team with you and get there successfully, you have to get the confidence of the people back. We have to get the people who want to grow trees doing so. We are on 12% afforestation with approximately 770,000 ha. The European average is 40% and that says it all, but the positive in that is that the 770,000 ha that are planted are storing 312 million tonnes of CO₂and will take in another 3.6 million tonnes of CO₂annually. If we were on the target of 8,000 ha per year, those figures would be welcome to everybody.