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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
66 November/December 2020
B
ORD NA Móna and Coillte Teoranta
own almost % of Ireland’s land
surface. And they both have round
to halt after a decade of litiious
environmental fusillades. The
sawmills are fallin silent and the industrial
machinery on the bos is idle in the sheds.
“I wouldn’t try and get there from here”.
Forestry
Irish forestry went wrong in 1989 when the
State handed over 400,000 hectares to a new
semi-state body, Coillte Teoranata, in order to
avail of anticipated EU grants. While the Minis
-
ter held a ‘golden share’, the company’s prin-
cipal objects were solely commercial – when
the definition of sustainable forestry requires
three elements – economic, environmental,
and social. The conifers chosen – Sitka spruce
- grew ‘three times as fast in Ireland’. Ironically
for just that reason because of the consequent
distance between the sappy annual rings, the
quality is poor.
The awarding of EU funding at that time
came under CAP [Common Agricultural Policy]
and so fell to Ireland’s Ray MacSharry, Europe
-
an Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural De-
velopment from 1988 to 1993. Known as ‘Mac
the Knife’ for his cuts as Minister for Finance
in 1982, the ‘MacSharry reforms’ – including
the 1994 Forestry Measure of the CAP – teed
up grants for forestry which covered the entire
cost of the initial plantation and a generous
income per hectare (compared to one or two
sheep) for 15 years, with the final product tax-
free.
Coillte, whose notorious agents lurked
around every by-way of rural Ireland, bought
up small holdings from elderly bachelors, of
-
On forests and bogs,
They’re not Listening Still
by Tony Lowes
The sawmills are silent, the bog-cutting machinery is still: have the
environmentalists won?
90% of the endangered and protected
freshwater pearl mussels in the eight most
protected catchments will be lost if the
Government’s continues to implement its
forestry model.
ten sealed in deals done in public houses.
Heavy machinery then crushed and drained
the land. Field patterns and landscapes were
obliterated, and archaeology heedlessly de
-
stroyed, unrecorded; with the Heritage Council
warning in 1998 that “Aorestation now poses
a greater threat to archaeology than most other
rural land uses”. “Given that Coillte is the larg
-
est single landowner in Ireland”, their report
by Freda Roundtree said, “the company must
be encouraged to employ at least one profes
-
sional archaeologist”.
MacSharry returned to Ireland to chair what
turned out to be Eircom’s disastrous privatisa
-
tion and take up the Chairmanship of Coillte,
itself considering privatisation. Coillte cashed
in on the grants he had designed and bor
-
rowed on the face of them to buy more land
for more trees. This virtuous circle ended when
environmentalists blew the whistle on Coillte
to the Director General of Agriculture’s Audit
Committee in 1998, pointing out that Coillte
were not “farmers”, as required.
The EU stopped the grants and clawed back
€8.3 million. Ireland took a case to the Euro
-
pean Court of Justice, claiming they had told
the Commission about their plans in a letter
that had been “lost”. The final EU Court rul
-
ing in 2003 said Ireland had no “legitimate
expectations” and awarded costs against us.
It transpired that farmers claiming the grants
included Elaine MacSharry, the Chairman’s
wife. Mary Coughlan, Minister for Agriculture,
quietly picked up Coillte’s €8.3m bill in 2006.
Unhappiness among residents of counties
like Leitrim, where planting rates are 24 times
even that of the likes of Donegal, have resulted
in widespread community discontent leading
to a legal challenge launched in July 2020 by
the Save Leitrim Environmental and Biodiver
-
sity Group. They cited the social impacts as the
dark and foreboding monoculture gradually
engulfs the last of their open land, obliterating
views and isolating residents.
According to the Sunday Business Post,
environmentalists took advantage of a 2017
change in the legislation by hammering the
Department with 624 appeals in just over two
years – 351 of them from veteran environmen
-
talist Peter Sweetman alone – bringing the
system to a halt. In a classic ‘shoot the mes
-
senger’ response, the Government rushed
through legislation last month imposing fees
for objections and appeals. They also dropped
‘social’ from the standard definition of ‘sus
-
tainable forestry’ – economic, environmental,
and social.
But the impacts are much worse than what
is visible, as bad as that is. When planted on
peat soils - most of our ‘unenclosed’ uplands
- farmers are required to apply 300 kg of the
world’s limited supply of rock phosphate per
ENVIRONMENT
November/December 2020 67
hectare. Leaving aside the fact that phos-
phates are running out and should be reserved
for food, phosphate does not bind well to peat
soils. Leaching out, it is washed into the sur
-
face water in areas that had always been nu-
trient poor. Phosphorous levels spike dramati-
cally at clearfelling. Algae growth in the rivers
expands explosively and then decays, steal
-
ing oxygen and leading to eutrophication and
dead zones. As driving rains disgorge sedi
-
ment, fish breeding gravels are smothered.
The underwater meadows on which diving
birds rely die away as the suspended particles
in the water prevent sunlight reaching them.
Conifers overgrow rivers. Wildlife vanishes.
Rivers die.
Worse yet, no matter how obvious it is now
that these areas never should have been
planted, the farmers were told the law was
they would have to replant. The Department of
Agriculture’s Forestry Policy Review of 2013 ar
-
gued cogently that this requirement was “un-
justified and counterproductive”, noting “the
unpopular replanting requirement may have
the perverse result of reducing rather than in
-
creasing the forest area”. In fact, there is no
“law requiring replanting”. It is a condition
that the Minister “may” impose – and “may”
remove from a planting licence at his or her
will. The 2013 recommendation, like so many
others over the years, expired in the silent De
-
partmental halls.
Clearfelling and replanting exacerbate the
original drainage which broke the soil crust,
undermining the soil structure and inviting
erosion with inevitable bogslides. A windfarm
in County Galway – Derrybrien - was subject
to a €15m fine last January from the European
Court of Justice for a failure to assess the proj
-
ect properly in advance, with €15,000 more
each day since. The meter is still ticking. The
cost to Leitrim County Council from this sum
-
mer’s Shass Mountain bog slide included the
entire rebuilding of a bridge.
The 1996 Strategic Plan for Forestry was pre
-
mised on the mirage of “critical mass”, achiev-
ing the “ideal or target size for the industry -
the scale of production large enough to make
true competition possible” - faded as planting
rates fell year after year.
Unable to achieve the necessary competi
-
tion, the Competition Authority authorised
Coillte to become processors, producing chip
-
board and panel board from two factories in
In recent legislation
imposing fees for
objections and appeals,
the Government
dropped ‘social’ from
the standard definition
of ‘sustainability
in forestry’ which
addresses ‘economic,
environmental, and
social’ criteria.
SHASS MOUNTAIN LANDSLIDE
These Leitrim County Council photographs record a major landslide which occurred on Shass Mountain on 28 June 2020 following heavy rain
the preceding days and nights. The landslide was triggered at the two main drainage channels of the forestry plantation. Large quantities of
liquefied peat, vegetation and trees flowed down the mountain. According to the Council “There has been ecological damage to the river over its
entire length from Dawn of Hope to Lough Allen and large quantities of suspended solids have been carried down in flood water into Lough Allen”.
68 November/December 2020
the South East.
And the planting rate continued to fall.
15,000 hectares in 2000, 10,000 hectares in
2005, 6,000 in 2015 - down to 3,500 last year.
According to a 2019 Comptroller and Audi
-
tor’s Report, “the 2015 cost to benefit ratio was
calculated as 1:1.18 for the programme (based
on the assumed planting of 7,500 hectares per
annum)” – twice what is now actually being
achieved. The Court of Auditors noted that the
mid-term review of the Forestry Program failed
to update this cost-benefit analysis – which,
as they pointed out, did not include the cost to
the State of the tax exemption.
As David Malone wrote in a Report on For
-
estry for the Department in 2008: “It can be
argued “that our low level of aorestation na
-
tionally and the fact that we were starting from
a low base, meant that the achievement of tar
-
gets was inevitably easier in the earlier years.
However, aorestation at a level of 7,000 ha is
below the most modest targets and in reality
is not sucient to sustain the sector into the
future”.
The final end to the EU bonanza came in
2007, when Ireland’s failure to meet a number
of environmental conditions ended the 75%
EU funding. The State now funds 100% of for
-
estry grants as State Aid – a decision that has
cost the taxpayer over €1bn since and - now
largely freed from Commission scrutiny - cost
the environment far more.
The percentage of broadleaves – an obses
-
sion by EU auditors as it is an easily monitored
biodiversity indicator – required by the EU in
approving State Aid for Ireland’s Forestry Pro
-
gramme 2015 – 2020 was to be 30%. Reach-
ing 37% in 2011, the broadleaf rate crashed
to 20% after Coillte introduced ash-die-back
disease by sending Irish seeds to the Neth
-
erlands for propagation because they lacked
the expertise and equipment. The repatriated
saplings came back in 2009 infected with the
ash-die-back disease that is still devastating
the 20,000 hectares of commercial ash in Ire
-
land and has cost the State €7m and counting
in reconstitution. Broadleaf rates recovered to
28% in 2018, but fell again in 2019 to 25%.
The forestry model was crashing – but no
one was to know.
According to the Department of Agriculture,
Food and the Marine’s 2014 ‘Forestry Review’:
“There is no ocial forum for the ongoing
monitoring and review of forest policy and
strategy. There is no annual reporting require
-
ment on how policy is being implemented or
any agreed indicators of achievement against
which implementation progress can be
judged. There is no institutional mechanism(s)
for overseeing policy implementation”.
The Government’s latest ’model for wood
-
lands and forests’ was savaged last year in
the public consultation by the country’s three
top experts on the freshwater pearl mussel, a
The EU is revisiting its 1999 Court case. Peat
for growing mediums is now a more impor
-
tant business than peat for generating power.
Irish bogs provide more than 50% of English
gardeners needs, and the Irish mushroom in
-
dustry claims it will be out of business without
peat on which to grow its product.
An Bord Pleanála’s 2013 ruling that the ex
-
traction of peat required planning permission
was fought in the High Court for five years (‘the
Government is changing the law and so the
case will be moot’) until the High Court ran out
of patience in December 2018 and demanded
tools be downed until the planning was regula
-
rised. Minister Richard (‘we will tackle climate
change together’) Bruton signed a Statutory
Instrument exempting peat extraction from
planning permission the next month. That in
turn was struck down by the Courts at the end
of 2019.
Notwithstanding the High Court ruling,
in May of 2020 Bord na Móna rolled out the
machines again, claiming to a gullible Irish
Times and RTE that An Bord Pleanála had al
-
lowed them to continue harvesting for the
2020 season. There was no such ruling. Be
-
cause of Covid-19 restrictions, it was not until
July that Friends of the Irish Environment took,
and published on Facebook, drone footage of
the company’s now illegal activities. Bord na
Móna announced a cessation of harvesting the
next day, and only 10% of the harvest has been
completed this year as they face a further eight
Judicial Reviews in the coming months, chal
-
lenging their plans to ‘regularise’ their activi-
ties with An Bord Pleanála.
The bogs can be restored. Bord na Mona’s
own 2,000 hectare conservation at Lough Boo
-
ra hosts 130 bird species; the Abbeyleix Bog
Project’s 500 acres beside the town is a com
-
munity-led programme that began by blocking
Bord na Móna’s machinery; it celebrates 20
years this summer. The Irish Peatlands Conser
-
vation Council’s Bog of Allen Nature Centre in
County Kildare boasts 388 plants.
And there are models - like continuous
forestry cover, like agri-forestry - than could
turn Irish forestry around. But in 2020 at least,
the businesses are bust, and the environment
is wrecked. And they’re not listening still.
Tony Lowes is a Director of Friends of the Irish
Environment.
nearly functionally extinct protected species
that acts like the canary in the mines. The issue
is the idea that planting riversides is a ‘soft’
solution to urban flooding downriver. Riparian
planting does indeed reduce flood events –
but it also drains low flows which concentrates
pollution, raising temperatures while reducing
the adjacent soil moisture levels by as much as
17% during the closed canopy in summer. The
conservation objective for the mussel is to re
-
store soil moisture and ultimately river flows.
According to the three experts, who were not
consulted during the drafting of the Guidelines
for the mussels, “90% of the endangered and
protected freshwater pearl mussels in the 8
most protected catchments would be lost if
this policy continues to be implemented”.
And Bogs
In a sense, the division between bogs and
forestry is an artificial one, with Coillte hold
-
ing 200,000 hectares of forestry on bogs while
Bord na Móna’s 80,000 hectares contain many
a testament to the failure of Sitka spruce on
bogs. As the company’s website now states:
“At one time, it was anticipated that, aside
from peat harvesting, our vast land resource
might be used for agriculture and forestry.
However, following extensive trials and experi
-
ments it is now clear that the future of our land
lies in a wider mix of uses”.
The industrial exploitation of Ireland’s bogs
– ‘the low hanging fruit of climate action’ - was
targeted by Friends of the Irish Environment af
-
ter the individual turf-cutters, banned in 2009
from their now designated bogs, pointed over
the hedgerow to the vast expanses of slick ex
-
posed boglands, and asked why they were be-
ing picked on.
Commissioning a satellite survey of ex
-
posed peatlands from University College Cork
in 2010, FIE provided the Government - and the
EU - with a geo-referenced report of 127 sites
where exposed bogs were indicated for in
-
vestigation, each over 30 hectares in extent –
none of which had planning permission or the
Environmental Impact Assessment required by
EU law since a 1999 Court Judgment.
One of the companies, Westlands Horticul
-
ture, was engaged in chewing up a Bronze-age
road dating from 3000 BC on a 180 hectare
site, itself causing the further ire of the Courts.
The underwater meadows on which diving birds rely die
away as the suspended particles in the water prevent
sunlight reaching them. Conifers overgrow rivers.
Wildlife vanishes. Rivers die.’
