The Ash Dieback 2023 conference, which took place in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, on Saturday (March 25), saw much anger and frustration over the plight of ash plantation owners dealing with ash dieback.
The first part of Saturday’s conference saw a panel of speakers outlining some of their experiences, which was followed by speakers from the floor giving their perspectives, and whose contributions were often emotive.
Speaking from the top table, Olive Leavy of the Irish Forest Owners (IFO) said: “No one is recognising the emotional cost to people.
“People made the decision to plant forests in good faith, to take land that’s in their families for generations and put it into forestry, and we’re looking at a dying and dead crop.
“The emotional toll on individual and mental health is massive. It’s not acknowledged, and that’s what I’d love to see come out of this,” Leavy said.
She added: “When people talk about forestry, they don’t talk about the forest owners. Farming is synonymous with the farming community. Forestry isn’t at all.
Following Leavy’s contribution, forestry contractor Michael Fahy took to the podium, and he outlined the detrimental effect the ash dieback situation is having on contractors.
“There are loads of new regulations forced upon us with no consultation whatsoever, leading to many downscaling and selling up. Many machines are sold for scrap.
He highlighted that there is a “serious shortage” of harvesting contractors.
He also said that timber mills in Ireland were buying in timber from abroad, due to the lack of contractors and the delay in felling licences, a situation Fahy described as “a disgusting disgrace, when we have it here and it is tied up in bureaucracy and red tape”.
“I’ve had to sell machines myself well below market value to keep going…. Drivers are leaving because of the uncertainty in forestry,” he commented.
“There should be a certain interest in getting woods back into production for the future of children and those coming behind us, and it’s not happening, because there’s too many people in this industry with a say in my business that’s not working in it or drawing a week’s wages out of it.
Fahy said: “Myself and my wife put this business together, from nothing we built it, and now it’s sliding on me. It has hurt us so much, and hurt my wife so much, when we had to let go men that we had for years, and they’re gone and they’re not coming back.”
Jason Fleming, the chairperson of the Forestry Committee of the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), also addressed the meeting. He said: “The [Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine] are coming back to the same cohort of farmers to plant trees.
“Most dairy farmers are not going to be planting 20ac to 30ac of trees. It’ll be suckler farmers, sheep farmers, people that are effected by ash dieback, who they go back to meet targets. How do they expect that cohort of farmers to plant again, they way they’ve been treated so far,” Fleming added.
Following that, the conference was thrown open to the floor for more first hand accounts of dealing with the plight of ash dieback.
One man said that he had planted ash 22 years ago, and first discovered ash dieback in 2014.
He thinned the plantation recently, and received only €10/t of pulp, generating murmurs of shock from his fellow conference attendees.
He commented: “I will never plant timber again. I would say to anyone thinking about it, run a mile. It’s a disaster. 22 years my timber was standing in the ground and I get €10/t. A waste of bloody time. My farm is tied up for the last 22 years. It’s a joke.
“You’re fighting government, you’re fighting Coillte and you’re fighting the Forest Service. I’ve been through it all with them. They’re a disaster. They’re not fit for purpose. They haven’t a brain in their heads.”
Another speaker told of his similarly distressing experience.
He outlined that he has 400ac of mixed forestry, which used to include five plots of ash amounting to 25ac.
When ash dieback was first noted in 2018, he went through a long and arduous process to get a grant of around €5,500 to take out the trees in one plot (complicated by the fact that the plot was on a special area of conservation).
However, when all the costs associated with that plot were accounted for (including replanting), it cost him around €15,000, leaving him €10,000 out of pocket on that one plot.
He described the process of trying to remove dieback-infected trees as “the most outrageous bureaucracy that I’ve ever dealt with in my life”.
Of the remaining four plantations he has, the speaker, in a state of some emotional distress, said: “Every single stick of it is dying where it stands. It’s falling down around me”.
“What can I do with it? I can’t do anything with it or I’ll be thrown in Mountjoy. Until there is change, a significant change, at ministerial level, and at official level in the Forestry Service, there will be no change,” he added.