The Minister of State with responsibility for forestry, Michael Healy-Rae, has said any farmer who wants to plant agroforestry should "wait until we improve the scheme".

Speaking in the Seanad yesterday (Tuesday, April 29), Minister Healy-Rae said that he did "not agree with the terms of the scheme at present".

"The first bit of advice I would give to a farmer who wants to plant agroforestry at the moment is to wait until we improve the scheme. I want it to be improved, and it will be improved," Minister Healy-Rae told senators.

During a discussion on the forestry sector Minister Healy-Rae said forestry had "got a bad name in recent years".

"Nobody should have to wait that long for anything from any department. That should not be the case," the minister said.

He also highlighted that following recent storms there "are 25,000ha of trees on the ground".

But according to Minister Healy-Rae even before the severe impacts of the storm Ireland had a "very serious situation in forestry, in that not enough farmers were planting forestry".

"As there are competing schemes, what we in the department need to do is make it more attractive.

"There is a struggle between competing schemes and the fact is that there are other avenues of land use and people are worried about forestry," he outlined.

However he also told senators that in relation to the government's forestry programme he is "thankful to the officials in the department and the people from the department working on the ground every day".

"They are improving every day. They are going to be so good by the time this thing is finished that they are going to be frightening.

"I do not want to be flippant about it because there is a serious side to it. There must be proper assessment and evaluation. You would evaluate an awful lot in a year, two years, or two and a half years, so that type of nonsense will not be allowed to continue in the future.

"I stress that it absolutely will not," Minister Healy-Rae told the Seanad.