If you're out and about this summer, and if you're the active type, you may end up taking a stroll around some part of the largest estate in Ireland, the 7 per cent of our land cover that is owned by the State forestry company, Coillte. Fintan O'Toole writes.
You may wander around Avondale in Wicklow or Lough Key in Roscommon, Dún an Rí in Cavan or Ards in Donegal. You may just ramble along a forest path in the course of doing one of the way-marked trails.
And as you do so you will feel a certain pride in having common ownership of this vast estate of 445,000 hectares of land. It is part of what it means to live in a republic that this State property belongs to all of us.
Except, according to Coillte, it doesn't. Coillte hasn't been privatised. It describes itself on its own website as a "State-owned company operating in forestry, land based businesses and added-value processing operations". All of its shares are owned by the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Agriculture and Food. Astonishingly, however, it regards itself as being a private company. This is highly significant in itself but perhaps even more so as an indicator of how the State in a supposedly republican democracy can develop a mentality in which what belongs to the State does not belong to the public.
Coillte's breathtaking view of its own nature emerges in a recent ruling by Information Commissioner Emily O'Reilly. Its context is the awful landslide that devastated the Derrybrien area of Co Galway in October 2003. The earth shifted because construction work on a wind farm interacted with heavy rains. The developers had started work without fulfilling seven of the 13 conditions that had been attached to the project by Galway County Council. The whole thing was a dramatic example of the failure of the planning process in major infrastructural projects that has so often forced local communities into protests and court actions.
The Derrybrien Landslide Action Group, representing those affected by the disaster, has been trying to uncover what happened. One of the questions they want answered is how Coillte came to sell the land on which the wind farm was being built. They put in Freedom of Information requests for the relevant documentation, which were refused by the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources and by Coillte. Last month, the information commissioner overturned this refusal. She was especially scathing about Coillte's stance, based as it was on a flat denial that it is a public company.
It is worth quoting directly from Coillte's submission to the information commissioner, not least because it has to be read to be believed. "Coillte", it claims, "is not an extension of a Government department, neither is it an agency, nor under the control, of any Government department . . . The relationship between the company and the Minister for Agriculture is the same as that between any private or public limited company and its shareholders. In relation to Coillte's forests and other land these are wholly owned by the company . . . The lands are not managed on behalf of the State . . . In this context, the lands owned by the company are, in law, private property and the transaction which is the subject of the request (the sale of the land at Derrybrien) is a private law transaction between two entities, neither of which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act."
Coillte's self-image could not be clearer: the vast tracts of public land that the State handed over to the company in 1988 are now private property, and no Government department has any control over what happens to them. They could, presumably, all be sold tomorrow.
What ignorant citizens regard as theirs in fact belongs to a private landowner.
The information commissioner describes this submission from Coillte as "particularly egregious", "an incomplete description of its legal status" and "unfortunate at best".
She dismissed its claims not to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
But what is especially disturbing about Coillte's submission to her is that it repeats claims that have already been dismissed by what is, with all due respect to the commissioner, a rather more authoritative body: the European Court of Justice. In 2003, the court made a binding and definitive judgement that Coillte is not a private entity but a "public entity wholly owned and controlled by the State". Yet Coillte clearly does not accept this ruling by the highest possible legal authority, for long after its delivery the company continues to insist that it is not a public body.
This is not an abstract legal issue. The whole point of Coillte's refusal to accept that it is a public body is to deny that the public has any right to be informed about its activities. It is claiming, in essence, that it is not accountable either to the public or to the political process. In itself this has serious implications, given Coillte's pivotal role in shaping our landscape and environment. And by extension it stakes a fundamentally anti-democratic claim: that the public has no ownership of what belongs to the State.