Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. Since my good friend Senator Malcolm Byrne has arrived with a number of fire crew members, I assure them I am not about to say anything explosive that will require their skill sets. I live in a part of County Clare that has a considerable amount of afforestation. We regularly have forest fires at certain times of the year. I pay tribute to the fire services and crews in that context because the work they do can be long, laborious and very dangerous, in addition to everything else they do. I am delighted to see members of the fire service here and I welcome them.

It is great to have the Minister of State, as one of our own, in the House. It is great that she sits at the Cabinet table and gets an opportunity to reflect more directly the views of this House. It was often said that Ministers paid less regard to this House than the other House and other aspects but the Minister of State, as a Senator, has a capacity to listen and share our thoughts. I welcome the work she has done to date and the significant amount of funding she and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, have secured in this year's round of funding, as identified by my colleague Senator Paul Daly. As previous speakers said, there is significant work to do to regain the confidence of potential forestry owners. There have been repeated announcements over the years about the volume of land that needs to be planted to meet our timber let alone climate change needs and we have fallen short on a continuous basis. There are many reasons for it but we have to learn from that and move on.

As the Minister of State is aware as we have discussed it in the House, there are significant issues about licensing too. I met a number of forestry owners and people who want to get into forestry recently. They cannot get their heads around the notion that if planting commercial timber involves going through so many different aspects of licensing. As night follows day, if you put a cake in to bake, at some point you will take it out of the oven and it will be eaten. If you plant a forest on a commercial basis, it follows that it will have to be harvested and processed. I cannot understand why there cannot be a one-time approach where all the work gets done at the beginning or part of the way through. I have numerous files in my office relating to people who have been waiting for felling licences for a considerable period. When they are told it will be two or three years, they just cannot get their heads around it. That is a disincentive. Perhaps the situation is improving and I have no doubt it will improve given the ecologists the Minister of State has appointed. We have work to do now to convince others who have been turned off as a result of this.

I have also met foresters and I received an email from the Social, Economic, Environmental Forestry Association, SEEFA, with which the Minister of State will be familiar, in which it raised a number of questions. I will put these to the Minister of State and perhaps she will get an opportunity to address them. As average sites are 7 ha and only 50% of licences progress to planting, how many licences are required each week to achieve the 8,000 ha afforestation target? Over the past six weeks, how many ecologists were involved in processing an average of 14 licences in that period? What is the cost of ecology input alone to issue an afforestation licence? How long on average did it take the Department to process each application and are these likely to proceed?There are real concerns here. I know the Minister of State will not get a chance to answer all of those questions but I will pass them on to her.

Senator Carrigy has spoken about the concerns with regard to ash dieback. I regularly hear from farmers who do not feel that they have been appropriately compensated or that there is enough support for them. In that context, I ask the Minister of State to come back to us at another stage on the reconstitution and underplanting scheme, RUS. She might identify what the current uptake is under the existing scheme. How many hectares, out of the total number of acres applied for, were actually affected? Are health and safety risks associated with dead and rotten ash trees breaking in strong winds? I spoke to a farmer yesterday who has a row of ash trees along a boundary fence adjoining a main road. There is a concern that these trees will fall. Are they the responsibility of the farmer, given that they were not planted as part of a forestry? Should the local authorities, in recognition of ash dieback, have a programme or a scheme to remove these trees where they are along the boundaries of main roads? It would be appreciated if it could be done in conjunction with the local authorities. I thank the Minister of State.