If it is being done I may say that I regard it as a most foolish policy. As a matter of fact, if it is being done it is time for the Minister to take particular notice of it. If there is anything in Deputy Davern's argument that trees of one year old have been planted and expected to grow in State forests, some bunch of officials somewhere in the Forestry Department should be fired out of it immediately because I am afraid that policy might have the effect of sabotaging our whole forestry programme.
In the three intervening years between the laying down of State nurseries and the increase in the number of plants which we expect we shall require for the increased programme of from 8,000 to 10,000 or 12,000 acres, or whatever it may be, for the coming year, I gathered from the Minister's statement that he intends to carry on during these years and go ahead in an effort to provide himself with more land, acting on the survey that has been made and that can be studied on the map which hangs in the Library. That is the proper idea. There is only one snag. Here, again, I am in slight agreement with Deputy Moylan in regard to the acquisition or taking over of the necessary land for forestry. The Minister has made it clear all along that he will be very slow to come in and take compulsory powers to take land from anybody for forestry. I can assure him, as I did last year, that if he expects that he will get the people to co-operate wholeheartedly with him in order that he may get 25,000 acres per annum for forestry purposes he is mistaken. The people have to be educated to forestry. Only when they realise that maybe rough mountain grazing, cutaway bogland or bottom land, as the case may be, will give them better employment and, at the end of the year, put more money into their pockets, as an industry brought to their back doors, will he have close co-operation. If he expects that, from the outset, people who own land and commonage, as they own grazing rights over mountains, will co-operate with him, I think he should realise that the Irish people are peculiar when it comes to something like that. However far his good intentions may lead him, he will find out eventually that he will have to use compulsory powers to get the tracts of 300 acres and over that he wishes to get in order to have an economic unit of forestry in any area or in any centre.
I come now to the question of planting by private individuals. I do not believe for a moment that planting by private individuals will ever provide us with the State forests that we wish to develop and encourage in every possible way. In the name of goodness, what good is a grant of £10 per acre and does anybody think that it is an incentive to any farmer or land owner to plant an acre of land? The Department should introduce some more tempting scheme. It might, perhaps, as a concession, cut the price of the necessary fencing materials and subsidise, perhaps, a little more the purchase of plants from the nurseries. If the Department would do that I think they would make the matter more tempting. A grant of £10 per acre is no attraction to anybody and that is the reason why so little advantage is taken of that type of forestry by private individuals. The shelter belts got from the local committees of agriculture may be useful but 500 or 600 or 700 trees are a long way off what could be termed a forest. When a farmer or the best intentioned man in the world sets out to plant and decides that, despite everything, the £10 per acre grant will do and that he will back it up with his own money and plant an acre or two of land which could never be brought to fertility, even under the land reclamation scheme, he goes to some private nursery and I have been told that the lowest price that he can buy three year old plants at is £16 per 1,000. I do not know whether that is true or not, but I do know from my own experience over the past year that that figure is very nearly correct. I know from a small plantation produced from the trees procured from private nurseries that the price of trees is altogether too dear. It would be interesting if the Minister would give us some estimate of what it has been found possible to produce from the few State nurseries we have, what it costs to produce 1,000 plants and bring them to the three year old stage.
I think that Deputy Moylan need have no fear whatever that the quantity of plants produced from nurseries will pass out the amount of land available. If such were to happen, the best thing to do with the surplus plants would be to turn them over and sell them to a private planter, or encourage others who can plant one, two, three or ten acres to plant these surplus trees at the very reduced prices at which they can be disposed of.
Last year I brought to the notice of the Minister that it was a very wrong idea for the Land Commission still to keep in their minds this 300-acre belt as the very lowest they can go into in the sense of an economic unit. They may argue, and with pencil and paper they may provide a genuine argument, as to why this is the least amount of land they find it economic to plant, but I suggest that where you have 50 acres or 100 acres or half a dozen plots containing 50 or 60 acres spaced, say, within a ten-mile radius, the Forestry Department should move in and there should be no stopping because they may think they want the 300 acres together in a single belt.
It came to my notice—I am not quite sure whether it was by way of a parliamentary question or otherwise— that until quite recently there was only one inspector in the Department of Forestry whose duty it was to survey any land that might be available. If that is true it is a shocking state of affairs that we could not have more of the Forestry Department staff out on surveys. I hope that the Minister will do one thing, and that is, that for every county of the 26 he will appoint one man for the purpose of surveying available land. If, in the counties where there is very little land, that inspector finds there is not enough work to do, he could then go to the counties where there is plenty of available land. If it is necessary for these inspectors to use compulsory powers, they should do so. If they have not to use compulsory powers, all the better, but that is the only way we can provide ourselves with the necessary land.
I quite agree with the idea of State nurseries. I imagine that by the time. they are producing we shall have the necessary land available. If we do not, the fault must lie on the Minister and, so far as I am concerned, he will get the blame if the land is not available and ready.
There is one thing I like, and that is that the Department of Forestry has decided to bring in experts from abroad. The Minister told us that they had a gentleman from Holland who is an authority on the planting of bogland and cutaway bog. They also had a Canadian who could give very useful information to our forestry men here on the planting of mountainsides and the planting of lands at high altitudes. This type of thing is essential. I will admit that in our own Department we have men, who, in theory, are very skilled with regard to the planting of forests, but they could not be expected to have the practical knowledge of people living in countries abroad, such as Canada, Sweden, Norway, the Scandinavian countries, where forestry is one of their biggest industries. The bringing here of those men to give advice on the different types of land and plants is a very wise thing. In doing so the Minister is taking a very wise step. He is carrying out in a wise manner something with which the ex-Minister for Lands is in total agreement and he may be relied upon to give every help and assistance.
I now come to the forestry workers. Everybody has sympathy with the forestry workers. Anybody who has had to work must definitely allow his sympathies to go to the men who have to stay out in the cold and wet to put trees down. We have not yet been able to find any type of mechanised tree planter which can cope with the work. Forestry workers have a hard task to perform and if it is at all possible they should get better rates of wages. They should also get better protective clothing. That has often been asked for here and the Department has been very slow in granting it.
When these workers are content we find that a better job is done. They are more satisfied and more eager to go ahead with a task which is of great national importance. It is something which gives them a means of living. The forestry worker is in steady employment and he has one advantage over the county council worker. The county council worker may be guaranteed six, nine or 12 months' work, but the forestry worker is guaranteed practically whole-time employment, year in and year out. It will make him more content if he gets the little extra he asks for and he will then take more interest in an industry which will be for him a life-long one and which will give him so much employment.
There is another man who is equally important and that is the State forester, who has not got the recognition that he should have got. State foresters should be established civil servants. They belong to the outdoor staff of the Forestry Department. It is most unfair that men who become State foresters through open competitive examination, after spending two or three years in a State forestry college in order to become expert, should be treated as unestablished, and, when they come to retire, should be thrown out into the world without a pension or gratuity of any kind, after doing so much useful work for the State. The Minister should decide once and for all to give these men established status.
A State forester is given charge of 200 or 300 acres of mountainside and is told to go ahead and plant it. The advice he gets from the Department or from senior officers may be very good and many times may be very useless, as it generally is, because the State forester has the practical experience. He knows absolutely what should be done—the correct way to plant trees, the distances to be allowed between them and the manner in which they should be set down. In addition to these duties, he also has to take charge of the paying of the men on Saturday night. He has to keep an account of the amount of plants used and submit accounts with regard to the amount of plants needed to complete a forest. Later, when forests have grown up and have to be thinned, he also has to submit the amount of thinnings taken out, with their value. He has to arrange for their sale and furnish all these various returns at the end of every week or every month to the Department in Dublin. In view of all this work, I think these men are entitled to be established and to receive pension rights. In England, State foresters are treated in the same way as ordinary civil servants—they are established—and I tell the Minister that if he were to look into the grievances of these men, he would find that they are not getting a square deal, in view of the amount of good and useful work they are doing and which they will do during the lifetime they devote to forestry.
We wish the Minister every good luck and will give him every encouragement in his great effort. If enthusiasm in this House and outside it can be regarded as any pointer, he can safely say that there is no obstacle whatever in his path. He will not be denied the necessary money because we are told that, even in respect of the borrowing about which we heard so much criticism during the Budget debate, no word of criticism will be levelled at the amount of money to be devoted to forestry. There are plenty of men.
There was emigration from this country, but there should be no need for men to emigrate when forests are to be planted. We have seen a map which shows that 1,200,000 acres of land are suitable for forestry, and as the Minister has adopted the very wise policy of providing himself with more State nurseries, he should have a very successful campaign ahead of him. Candidly, I think that if he reaches the target of 25,000 acres in three years, it will be very good work. I hope he does.
I find myself in agreement with some of the Opposition speakers with regard to the planting of any more than 25,000 or 30,000 acres. Even if we could do it, it would not be a wise policy because anybody who knows forestry or who has studied what has been done in other countries knows well that a country's wealth is greatest in regard to what is called a rotation forest. If we have 30,000 acres of trees to be felled this year and, at the same time, 30,000 acres to be planted, so that we can keep up a constant rotation, it represents our greatest source of wealth, as it is the greatest source of wealth of the Scandinavian countries, which have pinned the whole success of their industry to this system. It reached such a stage in one country that we have been told that legislation had to be introduced in Parliament during the past five years to prevent the farmers and landowners from planting arable land. The industry was so progressive and the temptation so great that people were going into the planting of land which could be satisfactorily used for agricultural production. We need have no fear for many years to come that we will use up all the non-arable land which is available for forestry. With all this land at his disposal and with the encouragement which he is getting, the Minister should have no trouble in going ahead with a very speedy and very successful forestry programme.
