REPORT OF DEPARTMENTAL COMMITTEE ON IRISH FORESTRY, 29 



Councils, SO that within a period of about eighty years there 

 may be in Ireland an ultimate forest area of at least 1,000,000 

 acres. 



In Part V. are given the reasons why it is necessary that 

 action in the organisation of forest work in Ireland should be 

 undertaken by the State, and the paragraphs on this subject 

 are distinctly among the most interesting in the Commissioners' 

 Report. One of the strongest points mentioned, among several 

 well -known and unanswerable arguments, is that while the 

 interests of the private owners are restricted to the commercial 

 profit realised on the investment (it is interesting to read this 

 when we know that in Great Britain, commercially managed 

 private forest estates are the exception rather than the rule), the 

 far more valuable indirect returns, economic and social, go to 

 the community as a whole, and the private owner cannot be 

 expected to take them into account as the State can. The 

 Commissioners consider that in Ireland especially the State is 

 obliged to take action, and we cannot do better than quote 

 their words : — 



" At this moment the process of destruction of the wood- 

 lands which is going on, and which has been described in 

 Parts I. and II., is due to the legislation of the State, and, 

 as we have already pointed out, this grievous waste of the 

 woods, with its menace to industries depending on them, must 

 continue unless the effects of this legislation are checked by 

 further State action. But in the past it may be broadly stated 

 that the excessive reduction of the woodland area of this 

 country is due either to what the State has done or to what 

 it has neglected to do. Leaving aside the cutting of forests 

 in certain districts for political purposes which had ' reasons 

 of State ' to explain it, the conditions under which great grants 

 of land were made after the various confiscations requiring 

 their use for the public benefit, were never enforced in this 

 respect. These lands, including the Crown lands from which 

 the Quit and Crown Rents that are now administered by the 

 Commissioners of Woods and Forests have been drawn, con- 

 tained vast areas of forests which are described in the grant 

 deeds as the King's Woods. No precaution was taken by the 

 State to save these in any way. Throughout the 17th and i8th 

 centuries the grantees were allowed to do with the timber as they 

 pleased, and what they pleased was in the main to realise 



