Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is disappointing that we are here today despite unprecedented attention on the forestry sector at the recent joint committee on agriculture. Like others, I have met with the IFA and other farmer organisations and with businesses. Senator Murphy mentioned Glennon Brothers in Longford. It is probably the largest timber manufacturing company in the country. It recently took over Balcas. It employs over 300 people in my own county. It is having a serious effect on them as the licensing crisis continues. There is a backlog of around 5,000 applications in the system and more applications are going in. This problem will only snowball and get bigger. We have committed to issuing 4,500 licences a year but clearly this will not happen. There has been no progress on afforestation. Fewer than ten licenses are being issued each week. There is a two-year waiting list. This is having a significant impact on farmers and businesses.

There is a complete loss of confidence in the industry and the loss of confidence in us as a Government to deal with the situation. We are losing millions of euro in lost timber revenues. Some 700,000 tonnes of logs have been lost in licensing delays in the last two years. This has hit both forestry owners and sawmills dramatically. That has had a knock-on effect on the building industry. There has been an increase in cost of around 45% in recent months. For someone looking to build a house that adds significant extra costs. Someone might have got a mortgage to build a house and then the next thing the price of timber has increased and increased again.

We recently launched a climate action plan but that plan is completely undermined if we do not have large increases in planting. We are missing out on millions of tonnes in carbon sequestration. Every hectare of new forest and its timber will offset 150 tonnes of carbon dioxide during its lifetime. Therefore, 1,000 ha that we do not plant is 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide still in the atmosphere. This year we will plant around 2,300 ha yet we need 15,000 ha of new forest each year to get net zero by 2050. There is a huge gap between the Government's ambitions for planting and what we are actually delivering.

The solutions that I have put forward come from meeting people within the industry and from documents they have sent us. We have to deliver on this. We need to totally revamp our regulation of forestry and fast-track changes to the system. We need to introduce maximum time limits and a functioning licensing system. Senator Lombard noted that a person looking to build a house will have set timelines, eight weeks and three weeks for objections and so on, and a planning decision delivered in three months, yet people are waiting for over two years. We should look at where people want to plant forests that we tie in the road licence and felling licence into that rather than replicating the whole issue down the line.

As others have said we need full implementation of the Mackinnon report. The Department needs to get serious about forestry, to be honest, and to support the forestry sector. We need new ways to meet our ambition in tree planting targets and our climate goals. We need a new forestry programme that will encourage and incentivise farmers to plant forests. We need to develop a forestry development agency. From speaking to the Social, Economic, Environmental Forestry Association, SEEFA, I believe it is the only natural resource sector without a development agency. We need to re-energise and reward our forestry sector and start supporting it rather than holding it back. We need to use more wood and to build a vibrant market for our timber products and reduce our carbon footprint. We need commitments on legislation to be brought forward immediately to solve this crisis and make sure that we, as a Government, can get back the confidence of those in the forestry sector. We are the people who can make those changes and we must do so.