NOTES ON STATE FORESTRY IN IRELAND 

 By H. R. MacMillan^ 



Ireland, alone of the four divisions of the United Kingdom, has 

 made an organized beginning in State development of forestry. 

 That this should be so is one of the fruits of the remedial land 

 legislation of the last two decades. Mainly through the exertions 

 of Sir Horace Plunkett and the movement for better use of the 

 land, which he initiated and to which he lent such steady support, 

 an Act was passed in 1899 creating for Ireland a Department of 

 Agriculture and Technical Instruction, charged with the super- 

 vision of matters so unrelated as agriculttu^e, forestry, technical 

 instruction, fisheries and light houses. 



Previous to the passing of this Act, Ireland had become the most 

 distinctly agricultural portion of the United Kingdom. The area 

 of woodland was steadily decreasing, and though there was a 

 certain amount of tree planting by private owners, chiefly for 

 shelter or beauty, there were practically no well managed wood- 

 lands. The land area of the island was, according to use, roughly 



divided as follows: 



Acres 



Use for agriculture (crops and pasture) 15,250,000 



Mountain land 2,208,000 



Peat, bog and marsh 1,575,000 



Woods 304,863 



Water, roads, fences 1,033,000 



The cultivated land was broken into very small holdings, averag- 

 ing 25 to 30 acres each. The moimtain land, which, according to 

 many writers dealing with forestry in the British Isles, and accord- 

 ing to the reports issued by various Commissions considering the 

 subject, is the land most readily adaptable for forest purposes, could 

 not be taken unreservedly as available for timber production. 

 The small average size of the farms, the pressure of population, the 

 dependence of agricidture upon farm stock give mountain land a 

 high value for grazing during certain seasons of the year. 



The value of such land in many localities may be taken at one 

 sheep per acre. To withdraw the land from grazing, and it> is 

 probable that the best grazing land only would repay planting, 



1 Timber Trade Commissioner for Canada, and Chief Forester, British 

 Columbia Forest Branch. 



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