It’s no fairy tale: we WILL be planting 60,000 trees a day
‘A squirrel will not have to take the train’
EMBATTLED Climate Action Minister Richard Bruton has come under fire after pledging that within a decade we would plant more than 200 million trees across the country.
The attack came from senator Marie Louise O’Donnell, who said the minister’s plans were the climate change equivalent of ‘the fairy tales of Ireland’.
In a colourful contribution the senator said: ‘The minister’s pledge to plant 250 million trees by 2030 meant, “we will plant 25 million trees a year, which means we will plant 2,830,000 trees a month [or] 69,000 trees a day”.’
The senator added: ‘I do not know who wrote this – I think it is the fairy tales of Ireland – but we have to be very careful of these kinds of announcements that are glossed over and given to ministers to say, and they say them with the greatest faith in the world.
‘Nobody,’ she said, ‘has even asked, if we are going to plant 69,000 trees a day, where they will be planted. Are we going to recreate Sweden or parts of Canada? What will be the size of these trees?’ Ms O’Donnell added: ‘I have checked it three times. It started off as 400 million and something and it is down to 250 million but with 250 million trees, we will be able to walk on the top of trees from here to Galway.’
A squirrel, she said, ‘will not have to take the train. It can walk on the top of the trees with no problem or it could swing, like orangutans’.
Separately Labour senator Kevin Humphreys asked Mr Bruton to explain an apparent reduction in the electric vehicle target from one million to 840,000.
Mr Humphreys said: ‘I have noted in a number of recent official documents that this target has been reduced but there has been no formal announcement.’
Mr Bruton, he said, ‘is going to have to explain when it comes to 840,000 electric vehicles where the other 160,000 have gone’ and said it was ‘typical of the back-ofan-envelope approach of this Government to climate change’.
Responding, the department said that the actual target on the tree front was 22 million trees a year, admittedly three million short of the figure in the minister’s announcement, but more than 60,270 every day.
The spokesman said: ‘Over the next 20 years, the target is to plant 440 million’ but added, ‘delivery on this target is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.’
The spokesman also confirmed that the new target for electric vehicles in 2030 is actually ‘936,000 electric vehicles comprised of 840,000 passenger electric vehicles, 95,000 electric vans and trucks and 1,200 electric buses. [This] has not changed’.
However, Ms O’Donnell countered: ‘Twenty-two million is still an awful lot of trees. The only place you won’t find a tree is the bus lanes in Dublin.’