I want to know what the Tánaiste's Government knows about Coillte's plan to sell off vast tracts of rural Ireland to a British investment fund and when it first learned about it? Last November, the Government announced €1.3 billion in new forestry supports. I welcomed the announcement and thought it was a good news story for farmers, who would be encouraged to diversify and begin planting trees in greater numbers. Conveniently, the Government forgot to mention that large swathes of this much-needed State investment would be diverted from farmers and rural communities to international investment funds.

Earlier this month, Coillte announced it had done a deal with the British investment fund, Gresham House. The Irish Strategic Forestry Fund will acquire tens of thousands of acres of forestry ground using a €200 million war chest, most of which is coming from the investment fund. As part of the deal, Coillte does all the work and private investors reap all the rewards. Coillte sourced tens of thousands of acres in rural Ireland for the fund. It will plant the trees and manage the forests. Meanwhile, of course, the fund will be entitled to grants and premium revenues of up to €60 million from the Government's €1.3 billion forestry supports, and this will be just the start. Similar partnerships with other funds are surely on the cards.

The news of this scheme has sent shockwaves around rural Ireland. There are fears land prices are going to shoot up as a result of this land grab by private investments, and those fears are well placed. We have seen what happened with housing costs when vulture funds entered that market. Why should the impact on agricultural land be any different? Environmental groups are also deeply concerned. The Irish Wildlife Trust has labelled this a scandal. It will be devastating for our biodiversity.

Yesterday, the Taoiseach tried to distance the Government from this grubby deal. He said it had not been signed off by Cabinet and that there had been no memorandum to Cabinet at any point. There may have been no memorandum, but that does not mean there was no awareness at Cabinet that this was happening. According to reporting by The Irish Mail on Sunday, the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, knew about plans for Coillte to use public-private partnerships to acquire land as far back as March 2021, nearly two years ago. Last week, after public outrage boiled over about this deal, the Tánaiste said it should be reviewed and alternatives explored. What did he mean by that?

Will the Tánaiste clarify when the Government found out about this deal, why the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, who is meeting Coillte today, has developed an interest in it only in the past week and why alternatives were not explored before this deal was entered into? Finally, if the agreement is going to be reviewed, does this mean the Government is going to reverse it?

I thank Deputy Cairns for raising what is a very important issue. The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, and the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, are meeting Coillte today, and they will discuss Coillte's role in the Irish Strategic Forestry Fund and how Coillte should work closely with farmers and local contractors to achieve positive outcomes for the Irish forestry sector and for Irish farm families. They will also discuss other models, and I think other models need to be pursued, to help Coillte meet its overall target of planting 100,000 ha of new forests.

This has to be seen in the context of the overall challenge, which is enormous, in terms of where we are coming from and where we want to get to in forestry. As the Deputy knows, about two thirds of our land is farmland, so in order to meet that bigger target we have set ourselves nationally, farmers will have to be the biggest drivers of our afforestation effort. Our farmers will also be the primary beneficiaries of the new €1.3 billion Forestry Programme 2023-2027, the largest ever investment by a Government in tree planting. The premiums for planting trees will be increased by between 46% and 66% and extended to 20 years for farmers, so there are strong incentives for farmers to become involved in this new endeavour and agenda.

New forests on public lands will primarily be native woodlands, focused on biodiversity benefits, because we really have to get that balance of 50% of all new forests being broadleaf and native to respond to the biodiversity challenge and crisis. From Coillte's perspective, we need efforts from both the State and private investors, as well as from farmers, to get to a very different scale of afforestation from that which we have experienced over the past decade. In respect of its partnership with the Irish Strategic Investment Fund and Gresham House, Coillte is saying it equates to about 1% of the current Government target of 450,000 acres of new forests by 2050. Ultimately, the fund aims to own about 12,000 ha of forests. About 3,500 ha of that will be new forests, with the remainder being the purchase of existing forests that the fund will concentrate on. Coillte will not sell out any existing publicly owned forests to the fund, nor will any other public body sell land to the fund. Any land purchased by the fund will already be in private ownership and no private landowner will be forced to sell land to the fund.

The strategy we have outlined is still before Europe, relating to state aid and so on. We want to explore alternative models but we are going to need an awful lot more on board to get to the targets we have set ourselves.

In one way, the silver lining from this issue arising is that we are finally having more of a discussion about agriculture. We do not have a Sláintecare for agriculture or the kinds of closely monitored targets such as those in housing to see how much progress the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine is making, but exactly the same playbook is playing out in agriculture as that which has done in those other Departments, and that is allowing the privatisation of a public good. In the future, we will have exactly the same conversations about forestry that we have today about health and housing, with always the private interests being protected. The Tánaiste said the Government is introducing these premiums for farmers and that is great and I welcome it, but now a private investment company is going to reap all those funds it has introduced, or a huge part of them. It is really good that this is being highlighted because we do not have as in-depth discussions about agriculture. We have seen this play out over decades of policy, and how the supermarkets are doing quite well while farmers are price takers not price makers. Larry Goodman is doing fine and beef farmers are struggling to make ends meet. This is the latest example of prioritising those private interests over the interests of farmers.

The Tánaiste did not answer any of my questions, so I will reiterate them quickly. When did the Government find out about the deal? Why is the Minister showing interest in it only now? Why were the alternatives not explored before the deal was entered into? Will the Government review this decision and try to stop it?

The Government does not run Coillte. Coillte is a separate-----

It is a semi-State.

Yes, it is a semi-State, but with a mandate underpinned by legislation.

The Tánaiste acknowledged the deal needs to be looked at. Is he-----

Deputy, please.

We can change that mandate but that is the mandate. The Government does not run every semi-State organisation and if it did there would be problems. The first people in the House complaining about Government interference in semi-States, and correctly too, would be, guess who? The Opposition. That is an ongoing challenge. As to the basic point, farmers will benefit the most from the forestry programme and from the increase in premium. Farmers will benefit the most-----

Why are they so annoyed?

-----and there will be no privatisation of public land. I have made that clear in my original statement. There will be no privatisation of public land. That is the point. In fact, I would favour more State acquisition of land for forestry. That is the position the leaders of the Government have discussed with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Again, we have to be careful of state aid compliance in how we do all of that and that is the issue in terms of whatever we do. The more fundamental point, however, is that we are not planting enough trees at the moment at all. We really have to grow exponentially the amount of trees, particularly native woodlands, and I want more purchase of land for native woodlands in this country. We should really embark on that programme.

The Tánaiste is aware the 2023 tourism business is beginning to open up currently and should be well under way by St. Patrick's Day which is only seven or eight weeks away now. To that end, I want to make him aware that up to 40% of hotel and guest house accommodation, 2,404 rooms I believe, or more, are taken up with refugees and asylum seekers. Some 400 men, asylum seekers, have been in one centre in Killarney since 12 October. I ask the Tánaiste two separate questions. First, what alternative accommodation will he provide for the 4,500 Ukrainian refugees in Kerry and Killarney? What alternative accommodation will he provide for these, many of whom have children who are now in schools and in the middle of the school year? Second, the 400 asylum seekers in Hotel Killarney who I believe are all men, should be removed from Killarney. They should never have been placed there in the first place, all together in one hotel on one side of town. These come from at least 12 different nationalities. Since they came there on 12 October last, there have been many reported incidents of friction between themselves on a daily basis with Garda vehicles outside the place day after day, culminating on new year's night at 8 o'clock with five people being stabbed and one fellow's finger being cut off. Five ambulances were outside the place and at least that many Garda cars were on the Park Road which is the main access to Killarney town. The placing of 400 asylum seekers on Park Road has caused a deterrent to many women, girls and even young boys locally who are afraid to walk the footpaths for leisure or necessity as they feel intimidated by large groups of asylum seekers. Ye landed these people and did not provide one extra doctor or any extra social welfare worker to the welfare staff. What vetting takes place with these asylum seekers when they come to this country? The people of Killarney and Kerry want to know. People are coming here without any documents. Surely they could provide documents after a few weeks or whenever. Are they just left to their own devices after they come in and they say they have no documents? I ask also about asylum seekers from Georgia and Algeria. Are they entitled to come here? Should they be deported? They-----

The Deputy's time is up.

-----should be deported when they cause trouble and they should not get asylum here when they cause trouble.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. The first point I make is that we have international obligations under international law. What has distinguished Ireland on the global stage is the fact that we are a rules-based country that believes in the international rule of law and that we adhere to that. One aspect of that is the Geneva Convention and European laws in respect of the treatment of those who seek asylum. Therefore, there is a legal obligation on us in respect of people fleeing war, starvation, or political oppression to hear their cases through the asylum process. When someone arrives into the country, in many cases without documentation or with no documentation on them when they present, they seek asylum. Then the legislative process this House has provided, or legislated for, kicks in and that application is then assessed. The number of people seeking asylum this year has dramatically increased over previous years. I think there are close to 14,000 to 15,000 people who have sought asylum. That is separate from those from Ukraine who are fleeing war. Approximately 75,000 people fleeing war have come into the country from Ukraine and we can all see the devastation in Ukraine that has caused this massive migration of millions and millions of people from Ukraine, namely, the bombing of civilian infrastructure and the terrible murders of the innocents.

In terms of the asylum seeking process, we are legally obliged under international law to give people a fair hearing when seeking asylum. That is creating a lot of pressure on accommodation. The combination of the war in Ukraine, allied to climate change and conflict in other parts of the world, is causing enormous pressures on our asylum process which is unprecedented in terms of scale. If you take 15,000 seeking asylum under the asylum legislation combined with 75,000 Ukrainians, one can see already the pressures on our accommodation system are going to be immense. Our public servants have worked extremely hard to try and absorb and accommodate the very significant increase in migration that has occurred. It is not easy and it is now challenging but there are no easy solutions either and I am not going to pretend that there are. Unfortunately, we are in a wartime situation in Europe and the worst war since the Second World War on the Continent and it is having very negative repercussions across the board. We have conflict elsewhere as well in the neighbourhood of Europe, all of which is creating this movement and migration. Every single other country in Europe is also experiencing this.

The Tánaiste has obligations here to the people in Ireland as well, to the people in Kerry, to the hotel and tourism sector and to all the people involved in tourism in Kerry. Is he going to free up the 2,404 hotel rooms in Killarney and Kerry and ensure the livelihood of all these people with craft shops, pubs, coach tours, jarveys, boatmen, cycle tours and heritage centres? Is he going to jeopardise all these people if we do not find other accommodation? I asked the Tánaiste about this last November. What has the Government done since? What accommodation has been found? It is fine to say there is a legal obligation to the people outside but if the thing is not being done properly, and if the Government is compromising our own operators here in Kerry in this instance, it is not fair and it is not fair on those people. It is also not fair to land 400 asylum seeker men into one end of Killarney town and make the women, girls and young boys in Killarney afraid to walk the town. The Tánaiste has an obligation to those people too in case he is forgetting and it is very important that he does see after them.

Shame on you.

Do not ever accuse me of racism or anything like that. We have refugees in Killarney for the last 20 years and I-----

Shame on the Deputy.

I took them to the North of Ireland to get their eyes seen after when no one here would do it.

Will Deputy Healy-Rae please sit down? Can we hear the Tánaiste please?

I will not take the Deputy's rubbish.

We should also acknowledge the support, goodwill and solidarity of many communities the length and breadth of the country, including in Kerry, displayed towards those who have sought shelter on our shores, particularly to those fleeing the war in Ukraine. There was a strong response in Killarney, for example, when there was an attempt to move Ukrainians out of Killarney.

People at the grass roots spoke very strongly in response-----

That was another stunt by the Government.

-----and that occasioned a change in direction, which I thought reflected the basic humanity of people in our communities. I understand the challenges, and the Government does as well, in terms of tourism and the pressure on accommodation. That is why a €50 million fund has been established and will be allocated to communities that have taken in a lot of migrants and asylum seekers, and also Ukrainians. That is a community-based fund, which is to recognise the lengths to which communities have gone to facilitate this, but there are challenges. Across Europe, this will be the debate of the year. We must hold our nerve in respect of Putin.

The time is up.

Putin is gambling on this exact debate happening in every parliament across the European Union. That is what he wants. I know Deputy Healy-Rae does not mean it that way. I accept his bona fides in terms of the pressures in his constituency, but essentially that is what Putin wants. Europe needs to hold its nerve for the next 12 months because what Putin is doing is attacking the values of democracy and the rule of law and those basic principles must win out in the end.