Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I warmly welcome Minister of State, Senator Hackett to the House. She is a frequent visitor and will be very much aware of the issue and challenges of the Commencement matter that I have tabled.

I live in a part of west Clare where there is a significant amount of forestry. The west Clare municipal district goes from the Burren down to Kilrush and there is much forestry in that area. There is also much forestry that is ready to be cut over the next couple of years.

The problem is when Coillte, for example, goes in and fells trees, unfortunately the roads, which are largely built on bog, are not able to handle the heavy goods vehicles that are transporting the timber. This has caused a major problem for people who live in the area, such as farmers and families who use the roads and the local authority. The issue is that the local authority could have resurfaced one of these roads. Coillte is then granted a licence to proceed to do its tree felling and to, essentially, wreck the road. There is no comeback for the local authority, whatsoever, in terms of compensation.

There are examples in Mayo where Coillte came in to the local council chamber and gave commitments in a specific area. That was because a councillor just kept highlighting the issue. Something similar happened in Kerry. Really and truly, we cannot have ad hocsolutions such as that. We need a proper plan to deal the reconstruction of these roads post-felling.I am proposing that if and when a licence is being issued to Coillte or any other party to fell trees, there would be a condition built into that licence for a before-and-after road condition survey to be carried out and there would be an agreement beforehand on the condition the road is in before the tree felling starts and on what condition it should be in when it finishes. To ensure that what exists now will exist after felling, there must be a commitment of funding, compensation or whatever word one wishes to use, and that commitment must be there in black and white. Perhaps the compensation could be lodged in an account and if the road is only in need of X amount of the money when the post-felling survey is done, that is all that would be used and the rest would be returned to the forestry operator.

There is an environmental issue here as well. We must ensure there are no difficulties. These State agencies and private companies have to work in tandem. We must ensure that everybody knows what is happening, what the protocols are and what is required of them, so that when Coillte and other operators are budgeting for the felling of trees they know they must build a compensation package into their budgets to restore the roads to the standard that existed before the exercise began. It is a very reasonable proposal. It came from the engineers at municipal district level in Clare County Council. It would solve a lot of problems and would ensure that the local authority funding provided for roads is used for the roads for which it is needed, not roads that are destroyed as a result of tree felling.