DEAR SIR: Donal Magner is to be commended for his exposition of the impact of the Forest Service’s ridiculous and indefensible 15km buffer zone for appropriate assessment.

Coupled with the designation of forestry as an industrial land use, this policy has all but destroyed a once-thriving industry.

Foresters are leaving the industry, unable to get work from sceptical landowners and if some brave landowner applies for a forest licence, unless the forester or the landowner pays an ecologist for a NIS report, costing €1,200 upwards per application, a minimum wait of nine months is to be expected before a Forest Service ecologist will be tasked with evaluating the licence application.

This was the response I received from the Forest Service when I queried the delay on a road application, made in 2018, so that a client could safely thin and harvest her plantation.

It will be at least a year before a decision is made and given the inexperience of these new ecologists, the delay might be two years.

As a working forester and from one of the handful of private sector landowners who helped progress private afforestation back in the late 1970s and 1980s, I am furious and disgusted that the industry has been effectively destroyed by the current inspectorate.

Faith broken

Faith has been broken with those who were encouraged to plant and who are now unable to get a felling licence or an afforestation licence.

How are people deprived of income in the industry supposed to exist?

Perhaps the situation is ripe for an enterprising lawyer to seek clients denied the ability to realise their asset value, to seek damages from the Department of Agriculture in the courts.

The minister needs to stop placing her trust in those who caused this entirely avoidable turmoil.