Sir, – John FitzGerald claims that the climate is losing out because an EU screening system is hampering Ireland’s ability to plant forests (Business, Opinion, October 14th).
Unlike barley fields, forests are only planted if landowners receive generous long-term taxpayer funding.
Operating an unlawful loophole to avoid prior assessments under a 1985 EU law, Ireland spent the 1990s allowing lucrative tree-planting on bogs that had been absorbing and storing carbon for millennia. Carbon vanished into the air or was washed away as brown water, taking taxpayer value for money with it. The European Commission had to intervene and, in 1999, the European Court of Justice ruled that Ireland was failing to take sensitive locations properly into account.
The screening system put in place to satisfy the ruling has since been developed to take account of other EU laws. Contrary to the picture your columnist paints, screening results in hundreds of plantations being approved without any formal impact assessment.
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Good screening is good for the environment and the taxpayer.
John FitzGerald argues that it should be superseded by “common sense” general rules, but screening needs to be strengthened, not abandoned. For example, the breeding curlew is now close to going extinct, its last habitats fragmented by poorly screened plantations.
Freed of the need for prior screening, no Irish agriculture Minister is likely to operate a regime of rigorous prosecutions for those who abuse the general rules. The temptation to use grants on the kind of land targeted in the 1990s would be great, with prosecutions as unlikely as prosecutions for illegal peat extraction. Still unbalanced in its mix of species, Ireland’s forestry expansion would resemble the expansion of the dairy sector, with success measured only in hectares planted and not in problems avoided.
General rules have their place but they aren’t a substitute for prudent prior checks on the use of public money. Ireland’s list of costly failures caused by “light-touch” regulation is already long. Forestry shouldn’t be added to the list for a second time. Not even at the urging of a member of the Climate Change Advisory Council. – Yours, etc,
LIAM CASHMAN,
(retired European
Commission official),
Brussels.