As the Cabinet moves closer to a decision on the sale of Coillte’s harvesting rights, a Swedish forestry expert has outlined how his country had to reverse its privatisation of State woodlands.

Failure of industry to take responsibility for regeneration of forestry was one of the main reasons for the recognition that privatisation had been a mistake, Olof Johannson, vice–president of Sveaskog, told The Irish Times.

Threats to the public’s right of access to forestry was also a factor, he said, even though right of access is guaranteed to both public and privately owned woodland under Swedish law.

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 The sale of the harvesting rights of State forestry company Coillte could actually cost the State more money in the long term, the Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture heard yesterday.

Donal Magner of the Society of Irish Foresters said the buyers of the harvesting rights would be unable to pay the full value of the non–wood benefits, especially recreation.

However, the State would have to continue to provide these benefits and this could mean the exchequer might not be a beneficiary in the long term. “This could cost the State a lot more.”He said fears about public access to forests after such a sale were “well founded”, as the sale of harvesting rights would “virtually eliminate the public forest estate and by extension Coillte both as meaningful entities, leaving Ireland unlike any other state in Europe or the developed world”.

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The privatisation of the State’s forestry agency, Coillte, “looks more un–likely every day”, according to Pat Rabbitte, the minister for communications.

He told the Dáil that Simon Coveney, the agriculture minister, was “probably agreed” with this statement but that “final conclusions have yet to be reached”.

He was speaking during question time on the chances of a bio–energy company being set up by Coillte and Bórd na Mona. Mr Rabbitte said there were “possibilities there”. Taoiseach Enda Kenny later said the Government “has not yet made a decision on the sale of State assets”. 

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 Coillte and much of our timber industry are in line to be the major rural victims of Ireland’s huge debts, according to economist Peter Bacon’s report on the proposed sale of Coillte’s timber–harvesting rights. 

He holds out the prospect of a foreign buyer exporting the timber without processing. A new private owner could also maximise short–term gains by increasing the timber supply when prices rise, and decreasing the supply when prices fall. 

Either way, a shortage of raw material could decimate the Irish sawmilling sector, or at the very least, seriously set back the potential of the forestry sector.

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Nearly 200 people have been arrested and 2,000 truckloads of wood seized in one of the biggest raids ever on suspected illegal timber operations in Latin America. The raid, Interpol’s first international operation against large–scale illegal logging, was carried out in 12 Latin American countries alongside national agencies from September to late November 2012. About 50,000 cubic metres of wood was seized, with an estimated value of about $8m (£5.25m), according to details released by Interpol this week.

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 Internet votes are urgently needed if a centuries–old Irish oak tree is to become European Tree of the Year 2013 as the competition nears its end. 

According to Tom Roche of Co Offaly–based Just Forests, the Irish tree is in third position but will need to more than double its 3,500 votes to overtake the leading Polish entrant. 

Mr Roche nominated the oak tree – known locally as King Oak – as Ireland’s first entry in the competition. Legend has it the 400– to 800–year–old Pedunculate oak (quercus robur) at Charleville Estate in Tullamore, Co Offaly, has a unique power.

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 If China can have a Year of the Snake, Ireland might yet be celebrating the Year of the Tree.

By Dan Buckley

Voting for European Tree of the Year 2013 starts today and Ireland is in with a real chance with a giant oak nominated for its special branches — and even more special memories. 

Known as King Oak, it is a majestic work of nature that has dominated the demesne of Charleville Estate in Tullamore, Co Offaly, for more than 400 years. It has been accepted as Ireland’s entry in the 2013 European Tree of the Year Contest. Since Ireland is hosting the presidency of the EU during the first half of 2013, the organisers, the Czech Environmental Partnership Foundation, thought Ireland should have a candidate in this year’s contest. Nominations were open to all environmental, non–governmental organisations in Ireland.

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 One of the country’s largest trade unions has called on the Government to abandon its plans to sell off the harvesting rights of trees owned by Coillte.

Impact yesterday claimed that the controversial proposal to put the assets of the State–owned forestry company on sale made no economic sense based on the findings of research it had commissioned. 

A report by economist Peter Bacon claims the overall result of the proposal would effectively liquidate Coillte as a viable, commercial entity. It concluded that the Government would need to obtain more than €1.3bn for the sale of harvesting rights for an 80–year period to compensate Coillte adequately. 

However, Mr Bacon said the Government would need to sell such rights for €78 per cubic metre — far above current market levels of between €43 and €50 per cubic metre.

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Recycled Christmas trees are being used for river restoration in north Cork.

The IRD Duhallow rural development company accepts trees delivered to its main office in Newmarket, Co Cork. They are used to help reduce river bank erosion, pinned to willow stakes along river banks endangered by floods. 

The trees reduce the force of the flood water which can erode valuable farmland.

Natural vegetation can grow between the Christmas tree branches, and in time the river bank becomes more stable — particularly important in rivers where freshwater pearl mussel and salmon are endangered by silt from erosion.

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Today, as over 1.35 million people have done this year, I will take a stroll around Kew Gardens. Kew may be a global tourist magnet, but it started life as an idyllic escape, a hunting park from which Henry VII’s court could escape the festering capital. George III’s parents, Prince Frederick and Princess Augusta, began a garden around Kew Palace. Under Queen Victoria’s patronage, Kew became integral to the expanding empire, supplying seeds, crops, personnel and horticultural lessons to the globe. Britain may no longer rule the world, but these Royal Botanic Gardens remain a powerhouse for botanical scientific research, plant conservation and cataloguing. There is barely a conservation project on the planet that does not depend upon its 253 years of investigation.

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Gloriously grand, gnarly and twisted, big old trees are the kings of the forest, providing food and shelter for humans and animals since the dawn of time. And they make pretty nifty places to build treehouses too! But now scientists say these ancient giants are under threat. According to a report published recently in the journal Science, death rates have increased alarmingly among trees between 100 and 300 years old. Swedish forestry records dating back to the 1860s were the first hint that researchers found of the scale of the problem. A 30–year study of Mountain Ash in Australia showed that big trees were dying at 10 times the normal rate in years when there wasn’t a big fire.

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An increasing body of evidence suggests that ash dieback – the disease which has killed trees across Europe and is now in Britain – originated in Japan. Some scientists say the fungus now ravaging trees across Europe is the same as a native species from Japan. However, the Asian version of the fungus seems to cause no harm to the local Manchurian ash trees there. Researchers speaking to the Radio 4 programme The Tree Scientists described the misidentification of the fungus.

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 A campaign against the proposed sale of some woodland assets belonging to State agency Coillte has been launched. 

Trade union Impact, which claims there has been no public consultation on the issue, has called for a “full public debate” on the effects of the sale on the tourism, wood–processing and recreational sectors. 

Under its plans for economic recovery, the Government plans to sell the rights to fell and sell trees on State–owned land for up to 80 years. The union has published an illustrated booklet entitled Save Our Forests, which contains articles on the impact of the sale on rural Ireland, forest roads, biodiversity and public use.

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About 5,000 ash saplings and plants are to be destroyed after the fungal disease threatening the UK’s ash trees was found at five Northern Ireland sites. The Chalara ash dieback disease, caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, was found in imported ash saplings in counties Down and Antrim. National Trust land at Runkerry on the north coast is one area affected.

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Just after I planted the onions in our allotment I started to find new excavations all along my neat rows. Sifting through the soil, I came across a secondary sowing – of acorns. Almost daily for the past month I’ve seen the culprits, passing repeatedly across the skies with that strangely faltering flight pattern. They belong to the species WH Hudson called the “British bird of paradise”, the European jay.It is strange that western society has such a downer on corvids, to which family jays belong, because they are truly the birds with the deepest work ethic. Every autumn the average jay plants 5,000 acorns to retrieve as food in the winter.

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Almost half of Northern Ireland’s countryside trees could be wiped out if the virulent ash tree disease takes hold. The Woodland Trust cautions that ash trees here could pick up the Chalara fraxinea fungal disease, known as ash dieback, from windborne spores drifting from infected sites across the border and in Scotland.

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The demise of the tree would be a terrible blow to what is left of our native landscape
The fuinseog has had most value, perhaps, for people; we should miss it terribly from what is left of the native landscape

The ash tree outside the livingroom window is down to its l ast f ew f ronds, t he bare branches smooth and silvery against the coppery glow of a young beech beyond.

It’s 22 years this month since we lifted the ash seedling from a forest path at Cong. We planted i t, of course, too close to the house. In full flush it shades the lean– to greenhouse and has us peering out into the leaves, a thrilling lettuce– green in spring, thereafter cool as an aquarium, with flashes of blackbird and thrush.

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 Trees part of a consignment of 33,000 plants imported from the Netherlands

Four cases of Chalara ash dieback disease have now been identified in the State, following yesterday’s confirmation of cases in Meath, Monaghan and Galway. 

The first case of the disease was reported in an ash plantation in Co Leitrim last month. 

The young trees were part of a consignment of 33,000 plants imported from the Netherlands about three years ago. The trees were planted in 11 sites across the State, including the four sites where the disease has been found.

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Imagine the British landscape with a third fewer trees. That is the chilling prediction being made this week by the Woodland Trust. A fungus that has already killed 90% of ash trees in Denmark over the past seven years has now been detected in a handful of locations – none yet in the “wild” – after first being found at a nursery in Buckinghamshire in February. If our government does not act urgently, warns the Woodland Trust, all Britain’s estimated 80m ash trees could be lost to the fungal disease known as “ash dieback”, or Chalara fraxinea. There is no effective remedy apart from felling and burning affected trees and banning imports of live ash saplings from mainland Europe, where the fungus has taken hold. Some arborists fear such actions might already be too late.

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