Sir, – On behalf of Green Belt, Ireland’s largest tree planting and forestry company, (more than half a billion mixed species trees planted to date), I would like to correct what Una Mullally (Opinion & Analysis, July 25th) wrote about the humble sitka spruce.
As a company we, and the rest of the timber industry in Ireland, embraces and encourages mixed species plantations. This has been a feature of Irish forestry for more than 20 years now, so the monoculture of sitka planting finished a generation ago.
Adding further species to Ireland’s planting mix is what is done to provide more timber with greater usages with added value to private and national estates.
There’s an inaccuracy in the article about the carbon capturing properties of sitka versus native trees. Sitka captures on average six tonnes of carbon each year, over two rotations, approximately 68 years (34 years per rotation). Hardwoods mature over 80 to 120 years and capture an average of 2.5 tonnes of carbon each year.
Sitka spruce is predominantly planted in poor lands that would not support hardwoods. Because of our climate, sitka grows extremely well here and the timber it produces is used predominantly in construction where it continues to store carbon through its meaningful lifetime. Sitka spruce does not auto-combust. Sitka spruce forests go on fire typically due to human intervention, be that from neighbouring land owners burning gorse or people lighting fires within a forest maliciously. In response, what Ireland does ahead of most other European countries is to actively manage fire-risk in plantations, by creating fire belts that prevent fires leaping into forests. – Yours, etc,
MAURICE RYAN,
Director,
Green Belt Ltd,
Virginia,
Co Cavan.
Sir, – Una Mullally argues that we should get rid of sitka spruce and plant only broadleaves. However, as pure broadleaf forestry is rarely a commercial proposition in Ireland, her suggestion would inevitably lead to fewer broadleaves.
Under existing forestry schemes, all new planting must have a minimum of 15 per cent broadleaves. In effect, the remaining conifers (typically sitka spruce) subsidise and pay for the broadleaves.
She wishes to see our island swathed in temperate rainforest yet seems unaware that sitka spruce is a native of the coastal temperate rainforest of northwest America. That is why this most useful of species does so well here.
She insists “the sitka has to go”. Well in that case, 12,000 jobs and ¤2.3 billion generated by the forestry sector will also go. – Yours, etc,
CORMAC O’CARROLL,
Salzburg,
Austria.
Sir, – Sitka spruce is the workhorse of our timber industry, supplying the bulk of the timber needed to build houses. Eliminating it from our forestry industry means it can be replaced in one of two ways, by imports or by greater use of concrete and steel. Imports are the current preference, until design catches up and pushes timber out of its structural role, making these cost rises permanent and making homes more unsustainable.
Una Mullally recently bemoaned the high costs that make housing unaffordable. One fact she forgot to mention is that recent increases in housing construction costs are down to the high price of imported timber, caused by the strictures that block the harvesting of mature crops here. She can’t have it both ways.
She adds to the populist demonisation of sitka spruce as a monoculture, but you can’t grow straight, knot-free timber by planting it extensively with grassy undergrowth. If you want to grow trees as a sustainable crop, and not just as woodland in which people can gambol and picnic, they have to be grown close together as a monoculture.
Neither can you grow other monocultures extensively, like wheat, or turnips, or potatoes, but I suppose we could always take a (broad)leaf from the anti-forestry brigade and just import loads of pasta to replace our non-native, monocultured spud.
By the way, not all conifers are non-native. – Yours, etc,
JOHN MULLIGAN,
Boyle,
Co Roscommon.