Ash reconstitution scheme – not fit for purpose?

Last year, Minister of State for Land-use and Biodiversity, Senator Pippa Hackett, published the report of the Independent Review Group into the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s response to ash dieback disease.

The group was tasked with coming up with a viable and acceptable scheme to assist ash-forest owners who have seen their plantations decimated by the disease. Following publication of the report, Minister Hackett established an implementation body but not all of the recommendations in the report were adopted, and this is the cause of much criticism from ash-forest owners.

A forester’s reaction

Forester, Andrew O’Carroll is a member of the Irish Farmers' Association’s (IFA's) National Forestry Committee. He offers his perspective: “Not all the recommendations were followed through. For instance, it was recommended that the cost of site clearance and replanting should be borne by the State, and that any salvage value from the timber should remain with the landowner. The review group also recommended that there be a tailor-made or bespoke re-establishment programme to replace the ash crop that would be comparable to supports provided under the new forestry programme. It was common sense and that’s why it was welcomed at the time. However, it was all predicated on being subject to State rules, and that seems to be the basis of several of the review group’s recommendations being left out of the reconstitution scheme,” he says.
“The payment of €5,000 per hectare is a Climate Action Performance Payment and since it isn’t coming from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM), it’s not under the remit of the forestry programme. It’s a separate fund so there is no annual payment.
"In addition, the site clearance costs are set at €2,000 per hectare, which people on the ground say is completely inadequate. Some sites require up to €7,000 per hectare, depending on the physical structure of the site and other considerations. Overall, the reconstitution scheme is not fit for purpose,” says Andrew.

Clearance of small plantations

There are also challenges emerging in relation to the clearance of smaller ash plantations, Andrew explains: “A lot of the ash plantations are one and two hectares and the economics of getting a harvester in to clear those sites do not add up. The contractors have no interest. Many of those sites are young plantations with little or no sale value for the cleared diseased timber.
"At the other end of the age scale, there are also problems emerging with ash plantations that are over 25 years established, from a health-and-safety point of view as well as the cost of clearing the timber. There are large amounts of briars and other debris to be cleared at great expense and it is dangerous work requiring more specialised machinery.  It’s all grand in theory and on paper but the difficulties on the ground are proving insurmountable in many cases.”
And timber clearance is not the only issue. Andrew continues: “The ground must be cleared for reafforestation as regulations demand. The payments are staggered over five years, but the upfront costs are immediate. In no way will the scheme cover those costs. As regards a lot of the smaller sites, owners are talking about just leaving them there, at a significant lost opportunity cost, because they were established with a view to a financial return over many years. Now, it may be cheaper to lose that financial benefit rather than incur further costs that they may never regain.”

Lack of flexibility

The IFA forestry representative considers what might have worked: “If the minister had followed the guidelines of the review group, that payments would be flexible to reflect specific site circumstances, much of this trouble would have been avoided. In conjunction with the forestry service (DAFM), the scheme should be implemented on a case-by-case basis, and if there’s extra expense and additional grants needed on a particular site, that should be mandated by the forestry service in conjunction with contractors working on the ground.
“The result of this inflexibility is an increasing loss of confidence among existing and potential forest owners. We have historically low levels of planting and instead of the targeted 8,000 hectares being planted annually, we had a fraction of that planted last year and this year is not any better. We will move from having a growing forestry sector to a static one, at a time when we need more trees,” he says.

Bark Beetle danger

Andrew also drew attention to another potential threat to the Irish forestry sector in the form of the Ips cembrae beetle, commonly known as the bark beetle. He explains: “We have called for a suspension of imports of logs from Scotland, subject to review of all the necessary preventative measures to avoid the introduction of the bark beetle. We were reassured by the DAFM that Scottish timber imports were from a pest-free zone with checks at both the export and import ports.

We asked that all imported timber would be debarked and kiln dried to prevent pest infection coming into the country,” says Andrew.

Andrew continues: “Now we know that some pests have been found in insect traps at Cork Port that have the potential to decimate our Sitka Spruce plantations, which are our most economically viable timber source, covering over 50 per cent of our afforested land. Even if the pest does not emerge as a threat in our forests, we must ban all imports of timber from Scotland. The precautions are clearly not adequate to prevent infested timber coming into Ireland. We have been forewarned by allowing Ash dieback disease into the country. We don’t appear to have learned from that catastrophe.”