The recently formed Save Our Forests – Save Our Lands Alliance are holding a protest outside Coillte Headquarters in Newtownmountkennedy on Friday 24 February at 1 pm to demand radical reform of the state forestry board.
This will be the first time that a Protest has occurred at the Coillte HQ since their inception in 1988.
This follows on from a protest the Alliance held outside the Dáil on 26 January demanding an end to the Coillte/Gresham House deal and the reform of Coillte.
The call for reform of the Coillte’s mandate, as outlined in the Forestry Act 1988 has also come from the Joint Oireachtas Climate Committee report in 2019, The Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity 2023, the Environmental Pillar, Stop Climate Chaos and SWAN (sustainable water network).
Coillte’s recent attempt to finalise a land sale agreement with Gresham House, one of Europe’s largest investment companies, has outraged farmers, foresters and environmentalists alike.
Coillte’s proposal to sell thousands of hectares of Irish land to foreign investors is just a symptom of long-standing mismanagement of the public forest estate, from environmental disasters like the Derrybrien wind farm to conflicts of interest within its management such as Imelda Hurley being CEO of Coillte and President of IBEC, a business lobby group, and other long-standing environmental oversight issues.
The Alliance will hand in a letter outlining these and other concerns to the Coillte board on Friday at the protest.
