In the House last night I was speaking on the question of the acquisition of land for forestry being the greatest difficulty. I am aware of the difficulty in the fulfilment of the programme, of which the House and the country are already aware, of planting 25,000 acres at least. Many Deputies seem to fear the provision of the 1946 Act, which allows the Department of Forestry to use compulsory powers for the acquisition of land. They pressed on me the need that I should step carefully and warily in acquisition. They were really pushing an open door, because I consider that in most cases the finding of suitable land for forestry acquisition will be dependent on the small farmer rather than the big farmer.
When I say small farmers, I mean farmers with a low valuation who have land in mountainous areas. While their acreage might be fairly large, and in some cases extremely large, the quality of the land is poor and the poor law valuation, as I am sure most Deputies familiar with these districts know, is small. For that reason I do not propose to use compulsion except in extreme cases or in cases, for instance, where a number of tenants—eight, ten or 15 tenants—have a right of commonage and where the vast majority of them are anxious to sell their interests in that commonage. If I find in a case like that that one or two are objecting, just through peevishness or for some other cause, we would have to consider using compulsion on the one or two objectors. Even in such cases as that, there is provision for striping the commonage, so to speak, leaving the one or two objectors their share of the commonage.
What happens in a great many cases is that one or two landowners living near the commonage enjoy the full benefit of it to the exclusion of their neighbours living further away who have equal rights to that commonage. At least, that occurs in many cases in the West. To meet such a situation where you might have 12 to 15 small farmers having a right of commonage and where, say, 14 of them were willing to sell while one of them is objecting to sell, it might be necessary to use compulsory methods, but even in that case I would be very slow to use compulsion. It may be necessary to cut off one-fifteenth part of the commonage and leave it in enjoyment of the person who does not wish to sell, and take over the remainder of the commonage. Taking it by and large, I am opposed to compulsion although some Deputies seem to think that compulsion should be used for the purpose of getting our programme fulfilled. I think that would be very dangerous because we have a peculiar system of land tenure in this country. To establish that system much blood was spilt. The fight for the establishment of that system brought to the forefront men such as Davitt, Dillon and Parnell, who devoted their whole lives to the struggle to secure peasant proprietorship. I do not think any Irish Government would seek to undo or to endanger that right which the tenants now have.
I do not want Deputies, however, to get it into their heads that we are going to stand back in any way in our efforts to get suitable land for forestry. We are going to offer every inducement to people who have suitable forestry land, particularly in mountainous areas, to sell us that land. I have no doubt that the people living in those areas will be prepared to make us offers of suitable land even though agricultural prices are higher than they were ever offered before. For that reason it is hard to expect people to part with their land easily. Nevertheless, I want to say that there is a keen desire amongst people in all parts of the country to make such land available for forestry purposes. As a matter of fact, offers are starting to come in from many parts of the country. Since I announced the 25,000-acre programme some months ago, offers are pouring in, so much so that at the moment we find that our inspectorial staff is insufficient to deal with all these offers. Some Deputies mentioned that we were taking offers rather carelessly and that we were not sending out inspectors to investigate them. The real truth of the matter is that we have not a sufficient staff to deal with the number of offers coming in at the moment.
I might point out at this stage that up to the time of the change of Government there was a great deal of talk about forestry and about the area available for forestry. Some mentioned 1,000,000 acres, others said there were 3,000,000, while more said there were 7,000,000, and men who had given a good deal of thought to the problem and who had read a lot about it could only make just a vague guess. Just shortly after I came into office I asked the Forestry Department to set about making a survey of land suitable and available for forestry all over the country. When I say "suitable" land I want Deputies to realise that all suitable land may not come into our hands or may not be offered to us. There are many landowners who may not be willing to sell suitable land, but the survey is fairly well advanced and I hope to have it completed by September or October. While it may not be extremely accurate, nevertheless it will be able to give us once and for all an idea of how much land is suitable for forestry. After that, when we see what offers are made, we can approach the owners and ask them to sell the land to us.