Blog
A Case Against Coillte
I grew up in Kilkenny, on the edge of the wooded valley of a nameless tributary of a tributary of the River Nore. This island of oak, yew, and ash in a sea of strictly managed farmland was not, however, what came to mind if you asked me to picture a forest. It was an aberration, an anachronistic relic of the era of an Tuatha Dé Dannán. A proper forest - at least according to my peers, my parents, and my geography teacher - consisted of neat rows of Sitka Spruce trees, with a guaranteed dividend paid by the government owned forestry company: Coillte.
This stark contrast was at its clearest in the Woodstock Estate, about ten miles from where I lived. The Georgian manor house fell under the control of the Irish Free State leading to its ultimate destruction in the Irish Civil War, and, in the years following, its well managed gardens and woodland began to re-wild. The estate was subsequently divided and the portions not hosting tenant farmers fell under the remit of the forestry division of the Department of Agriculture, which would go on to be incorporated as Coillte.
Coillte’s parcel of land was large in comparison to most of its plantations, so it opted to leave the dense forest at the heart of the estate alone in order to meet its obligation to provide recreational parkland. It was at the boundary of these two contrasting woodlands that the injustice of industrial forestry first became apparent to me. On one side lay a verdant forest teeming with plants and animals while the other side had no life besides the trees themselves. I recall once being surprised to find a dead bramble among the spruce trees. It was the only native plant I could see in any direction.
The floor of a Coillte plantation is cloaked in permanent shadow. The trees are planted to provide the optimal yield for the area of land and, as such, no gaps are permitted. The middle of a Coillte forest is a place that induces an almost primal sense of unease. Rows of bare brown trunks stretch into an unseen canopy, with your view limited to a few meters in front of you by the protrusion of thousands of bare twigs. But the view is far from the most unsettling thing; that’s the silence, an ever present reminder that you’re beyond the reach of both wind and wildlife.
Coillte’s “forests” never support a broader ecosystem and they take great pains to ensure that this remains the case. When the saplings are planted, the ground is doused with Glyphosate herbicide to ensure the young trees have no competition. This has the knock-on effect of eradicating ground-dwelling animals in one fell swoop. Next comes the fertiliser: tonne after tonne of ammonium nitrate is spread across plantations that frequently line young river valleys, poisoning and eutrophying our waterways at the source.
For years I accepted this as an economic necessity. My stance was that the ecological carnage was offset, at least in part, by the carbon sequestered by the trees. After all, this was how Coillte justified it on RTÉ. I could not, however, shake off the sense of revulsion and unease I felt within a forestry plantation. The calm and re-assurance afforded to me by the heart of the Woodstock Estate vanished within metres of the edge of the preserved woodland.
But two years ago, I saw another path while on a visit to England. I decided to go for a walk in Wareham Forest, a commercial plantation carved from Hardy’s Egdon Heath. I have no doubt he would’ve pictured it while penning Tess’s fateful journey to Sandbourne. I wandered around for a few hours while listening to a podcast and reflecting on a stressful spell at work and on my way back to my car, it clicked: this was a commercially managed forest, but I could see sunlight through the canopy and Sika deer bounding away from me.
Like in Woodstock, the commercial forestry plantation directly borders a densely forested demesne. But, unlike in Woodstock; if anything, the plantation was more welcoming than the untamed forest. With the wild Drax estate over the fence choking on Rhododendrons, the forestry plantation had an abundance of flora and fauna. There was no trace of Glyphosate here, and small plants thrived in the gaps between the mature trees. Wareham Forest also plays host to several endangered reptiles, including smooth snakes and sand lizards.
Change has been slow to manifest. The second-largest party in the Dáil explicitly state that they wish to end monocultural forestry in Ireland entirely. General elections, however, are far between and sustainable forestry is not likely to rank highly on any government’s priority list. If anything, they just seem to be paying lip service to the concept as a means of greenwashing. No party or TD has proposed a method for implementing sustainable native forestry. So, what can be done in the meantime?
In Leitrim, a county in the north-west of the country near the border with Northern Ireland, Save Leitrim is working to protect its threatened peat bogs, one of the most effective carbon sinks known to man, from Coillte. Save Leitrim held a public demonstration during which 150 participants uprooted thousands of Sitka Spruce saplings and used them to dam the drains Coillte had dug during their greenwashed destruction of the already damaged bog.
By destroying the plantation in such a dramatic fashion, Save Leitrim managed to bring national coverage to Coillte’s destruction of a carbon sink for the sake of paying dividends, while simultaneously repairing a portion of the damage they’d done to the delicate peat bog ecosystem in the process. Direct action is vitally important in the restoration of ecosystems ravaged by Coillte, but it's unlikely to keep them from causing more harm in the future. The root cause of the issue is the act which established Coillte in the first place.
Coillte came into being in 1988 as a result of the Forestry Act, which established in clause A of section 12 the new company's principal object:
"To carry on the business of forestry and related activities on a commercial basis and in accordance with efficient silvicultural practices."The act also establishes a general duty to "to have due regard to the environmental and amenity consequences of its operations" but, to me at least, this seems to be at odds with Coillte's principal object.
So, if you live in Ireland and you care about sustainable agriculture, I invite you to write to your TD and encourage them to amend the Forestry Act. Coillte's environmental stewardship obligations need to be firmly defined, and it must be meaningfully penalised when it fails to meet them. I would also question the utility of the clause mandating that Coillte must be run as a commercial enterprise, as it perversely incentivises it to destroy established and permanent carbon sinks - our peat bogs - only to replace them with transient ones.
