English oaks for jubilee fall foul of EU rules

NORTHERN IRELAND cannot import English oak trees to plant for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, it has emerged.

The Queen’s Green Canopy initiative urges people to “plant a tree for the Jubilee” to celebrate Her Majesty’s 70 years of service, but many British trees cannot cross the Irish Sea because of rules in the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The agreement means the province follows EU plant health rules, which forbid non-eu imports of certain trees – even though the UK has some of the highest plant health standards in Europe.

British nurseries were stopped from exporting 21 species of trees, including English oak, yew, beech, honeysuckle and elm, to Northern Ireland and the EU when Brexit took legal effect on Dec 31 last year. Poplar, willow, beech and birch are also on the banned list.

It comes as Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, warned that Dublin was preparing contingency plans for a UK-EU trade war in case Britain enraged Brussels by unilaterally overriding parts of the protocol.

The Woodland Trust has announced it cannot send any trees to the province from Britain. Other charities in Northern Ireland are providing Green Canopy tree planting packs, but only using trees sourced from the island of Ireland. “It is madness that we cannot plant UK trees in our own country,” said Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader. “As unionists, it is offensive that British soil, seeds, plants and trees cannot be transported from one part of the UK to another.”

James Barnes, chairman of the Horticultural Trades Association, said he had spoken to one British nursery that was prevented from sending 2,500 oaks to the island of Ireland by the ban. Another nursery had lost an estimated 10 per cent of its annual exports to the island.

UK-EU negotiations over the protocol, which the UK says has had a chilling effect on trade, continue this week.