The Kettle's Boyled: Getting to the root of the forestry crisis

From an early age we are told ‘never judge a book by the cover,’ but it’s advice we too often ignore. Any publisher will tell you that a cover design will make or break a book; if it doesn’t grab the prospective buyer’s attention, they won’t pick it from the shelf. Books are very often judged by the cover.

We judge people on how they project themselves too, that’s why almost all successful politicians tend to be smartly dressed. There are exceptions that do get elected, but they don’t always go on to be effective. You wouldn’t send a Minister to Davos dressed in greasy overalls, she simply wouldn’t be taken seriously.

The Healy-Raes have stood out over their years in political life by being different, with father and son wearing their trademark flat caps. In their case, their headwear was less a way of dressing down and more a clever marketing strategy. A lot of people took them for clowns, saw them as mountainy men who hadn’t a clue about anything, but the last laugh has been on the detractors. Michael Healy-Rae, in particular, is one of the sharpest and most effective politicians in the Dail.

Our forestry Minister was in this part of the world last week, and was interviewed on radio while he was here. People who still think the Healy-Raes are a joke should listen back to that interview. For a man only a few weeks into his role, the Minister clearly not only understood his brief but he also displayed a good grasp of the detail. This is a Minister who appears to have rapidly cleared the felling licence backlog to allow tens of thousands of hectares of storm-damaged trees to be harvested and moved to sawmills. In a Department that was renowned for a snail-like speed of movement on everything, that would not have been achieved by any of the previous incumbents.

Healy-Rae was scathing about the so-called ‘environmentalists’ that campaign against commercial forestry, the people who appear to believe you can get timber without growing trees. He pointed out that farmers and landowners have every right to grow any crop they like, and that nobody has the right to tell them otherwise. If rough grass doesn’t suit their purposes, they are entitled to build up a pension for themselves by growing commercial timber, and he wants to get back to achieving the 8,000 hectare annual target that needs to be reached to provide for our housing needs in future years. He also called out the people who object to forestry growing but who grow timber themselves, an anomaly that has often puzzled me. You’d think anybody supporting a campaign against forestry would first look outside on the family farm and ask themselves what those tall green things are called.