Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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66. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the reason there has not been a specific move to target the 500,000 acres of non-commercially viable Coillte lands identified by the McCarthy report in 2010 for the development of mixed native woodlands (details supplied) in view of the problem of land availability for forestry; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [47042/17]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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Coillte was established as a private commercial company under the Forestry Act, 1988 and day-to-day operational matters, such as the management of its lands, are the responsibility of the company.

The matter was, however, raised with Coillte who advise that it has a systematic and detailed inventory of all of the lands under its management which equates to approximately 440,000 hectares, or over one million acres, of land.  Coillte's core business is forestry and its ambition is to maximise the value of every hectare of land under the company’s stewardship. Coillte also advised that, of Coillte’s overall total land bank,  approximately 120,000 hectares are classified by Coillte’s inventory as being other than commercial forests and that these lands consists of broadleaved forests, mixed forest, inaccessible areas, bare/swamp and open ground. 

Coillte also confirmed that the majority of these 120,000 hectares is represented by relatively small blocks inter-mingled with commercial forest areas, with a significant portion of these lands classified by Coillte as biodiversity areas in line with the requirements of Coillte’s forest certification schemes, namely FSC and PEFC, and sustainable forest management practices. These biodiversity areas carry specific ecological management plans which may require the lands to remain unplanted to promote specific conservation values on site. 

Coillte further confirmed  that it is constantly and actively looking at its land resource and will plant trees where it is silviculturally appropriate and environmentally beneficial to do so.