Green members do a hatchet job on own minister
GREEN Party Minister Pippa Hackett is facing a grassroots revolt over her Forestry Bill.
The legislation has been brought in to deal with the virtual collapse of the treeplanting industry, which has threatened up to 12,000 forestry-related jobs.
The Government’s climate change ambitions are also being seriously compromised by a planning backlog that has brought tree planting, thinning, and felling to a standstill.
However, the legislation has
‘This is not the right approach’
received a chilly response from within the Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity’s own Green Party.
Galway councillor Owen Henley said he would ‘recommend completely scrapping the Bill. It is not the right approach.’
He added: ‘The consultation has been completely sub-par. There is no amending this Bill to make it work. Its goals are unacceptable, and I hope you will neglect its progress.’
Councillor Barry McKee, the Green Party Group leader in Bangor West in Co. Down, also slammed this ‘flawed and dangerous Bill’.
Mr McKee urged the junior minister to ‘be remembered for helping the right trees to be planted in the right places, not a monoculture of silks, spruces in all the wrong places’.
He added that ‘to stifle the right to appeal is undemocratic’.
Ms Hackett even attracted the ire of the Donegal Red Squirrel Alliance who told the Minister to ‘reject the Mackinnon Report. Put the creation of new forestry programmes front and centre’.
James Mackinnon, a former government planner from Scotland, reviewed Ireland’s forestry licence approval process.
Opposition has centred on the introduction of fees to lodge appeals against the Government’s forestry programme, with one source noting: ‘ This is the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge.’ We told people, they added, ‘ that in this election it would be a case of vote Green, get Green. Instead it appears to have been a case of vote Green get Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil’.
In an indication of a serious breakdown in cohesion, some councillors have also expressed shock that the Bill is on the point of being passed.
One said: ‘We thought that this Bill had been taken off the list. We should not be doing this.’
Some Green councillors even appealed to senators and TDs to take their own minister on.
Green senators were described by one source as being ‘ deeply unhappy’ with Ms Hackett.