In January 2023 a UK investment fund launched a €200 million Irish forestry fund. The State's forestry agency was its operational manager.

The Tánaiste, asked whether this represented privatisation of public land, said it did not. He was technically correct. The fund acquires private land, not Coillte land. The 440,000 hectares of public forest the State has held since 1988 are not for sale. By the narrow definition of privatisation as transfer of title, nothing has been privatised.

What has changed is harder to put on a placard. Coillte, the State's forestry company, is now the operational counterparty for an investment vehicle whose long-term financial upside flows to private investors. The State sources the land. The State plants the trees. The State manages the forest. The State's sovereign wealth fund went in as cornerstone investor with €25 million. The capital appreciation, accumulating over decades as the trees grow, goes to the fund's investors via fees collected by a London-listed asset manager called Gresham House.

This is not a privatisation of public forest. It is something more interesting. The State has decided, on the public's behalf, to operate a private forestry fund.

The questions worth asking are how Coillte ended up in this position, what the public is getting in exchange, and what the structure tells you about what an Irish State forestry agency now exists to do.

The Act

The Forestry Act 1988 is the legal foundation of all of this and most readers will not have read it, because most readers have no reason to. It is a piece of legislation that has been in force for thirty-eight years, that nobody campaigns to change, and that quietly governs the relationship between the Irish public and 7% of the country's land mass.

The Act did one thing of structural importance. It dissolved the State Forestry Service, which had been part of the Department of Lands, and established in its place Coillte Teoranta, a commercial state company with private limited status. The forest estate was transferred from ministerial control to the new company. The State remained the sole shareholder. The forest remained, in technical and beneficial title, public.

Section 12 of the Act sets out the principal objects of the new company. The first of these reads: "to carry on the business of forestry and related activities on a commercial basis and in accordance with efficient silvicultural practices." The Act did not say Coillte should manage the forest in the public interest. It did not say Coillte should manage the forest for biodiversity, recreation, climate or rural community benefit, though it did permit those things to sit alongside the commercial mandate. It said, plainly, that the principal business of the new company was business.

A great deal follows from that single drafting decision. The State did not merely open the door to commercial forestry, it walked through it and set up office. Every subsequent strategic choice, the species mix, the rotation cycle, the development of wind capacity on Coillte land, the joint ventures, the management of investment funds, has been a faithful execution of the 1988 Act's central instruction. The people inside Coillte have done their job. Their job, in 1988, was redefined.

The Open Forest that isn't

The most-quoted line about Coillte's relationship with the public is that walking access is open to virtually all of its 440,000-hectare estate. This is true on the ground in most cases, on most days. It is not true in law.

Access to Coillte land is permissive, not statutory. The walker entering a Coillte forest is doing so under a privilege Coillte chooses to extend, not under a right the public possesses. The 2009 Coillte byelaws, made under section 37 of the Forestry Act 1988 and registered as Statutory Instrument 151 of 2009, set the legal terms. The relevant clause reads: "Coillte lands shall be open on such days and during such hours and to such extent as may be determined from time to time by Coillte." Days, hours, extent. All three at the company's discretion. Where Coillte has posted a notice of application of the byelaws at a visible point of entry, the byelaws govern the visit.

This is the legal frame the "Open Forest" brand sits on top of. It is the frame the brand does not advertise. The public walking the forest is doing so because Coillte has, this week, chosen not to restrict the access. There is no equivalent in Irish law to the statutory right of access that exists in Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland or Estonia. There is the discretion of a commercial state company.

The discretion is exercised. Cycling on Coillte land is restricted to waymarked routes, and the gravel-cycling community has been campaigning for years for wider access and has not received it. Forests are closed for harvesting. Forests are closed for storm damage. Forests are closed when public presence is at odds with operational priorities. Walkers in Laois have watched their local forests destroyed by clearfelling during the very period the Open Forest brand was being marketed nationally. None of these closures require legislation, public consultation or public notice in advance. They happen at the company's pleasure.

The same Act that established the company on a commercial basis in 1988 established the byelaw mechanism by which the company unilaterally governs entry to the public forest in 2009. The two are part of the same instrument. The forest you walk in this weekend is, in the eyes of the law, the forest Coillte has agreed to let you walk in this weekend. Tomorrow's policy is not your decision.

What the company-form delivered

Sitka spruce now occupies 51% of Ireland's forest area. Native broadleaf species, oak, ash, birch, hazel and alder, the deep-rooted indigenous tree cover that grew over Ireland for ten thousand years, covers less than 2% of the country. Industrial conifer plantation, dominated by Sitka, covers approximately 9% of Ireland's land mass, much of it laid down on cutaway peatland that releases more carbon when planted than the trees lock up over a forty-year rotation.

This is the ecological signature of three and a half decades of commercial-mandate forestry. It is not the result of foresters preferring Sitka. It is the result of a company-form being instructed to operate on a commercial basis and finding, predictably, that Sitka delivers higher revenue per hectare on a shorter rotation than any indigenous broadleaf. Oak grows for a century before it is harvestable timber. Sitka grows for thirty-five years. Set the two species against each other on a balance sheet and the answer is mechanical.

The Forest Service was already planting Sitka heavily before 1988. What the Act did was lock the bias in. A ministerial Forestry Service operating without a commercial-basis instruction could, in principle, have shifted the species mix in response to public consultation, climate science or a change of government. A commercial state company with a statutory commercial-basis instruction has a much narrower set of options, and finance directors who would have a great deal to say about any deliberate revenue reduction.

The Sitka mountain is the visible part of the gap between what the public thinks it owns and what the company that holds the public's forest is, by statute, obliged to deliver. There are other parts of that gap, less visible, that have been added in the last decade.

The privatisation that failed

In 2013 the Fine Gael / Labour cabinet, under pressure from the Troika to deliver State asset sales, proposed to sell Coillte's harvesting rights for somewhere between €400 million and €774 million. The proposal would not have transferred the land. It would have transferred the right to harvest and sell timber from the public forest for an extended period, with the State retaining bare ownership of the underlying ground.

A report by the economist Peter Bacon concluded that the sale would cost the State €1.3 billion in lost profit flow and pension liabilities, more than twice what the highest projected sale proceeds would deliver. Approximately 12,000 rural jobs were estimated to be at risk. Around 3,000 people protested in Wicklow against the proposal. The cabinet withdrew the plan in June 2013.

The lesson the State drew from 2013 is the lesson that matters for what came after. Direct privatisation of Coillte, the simple title-transfer kind, is politically unworkable in Ireland. The public will mobilise against it. The numbers will not add up. The cabinet that proposes it will lose the argument in public and quietly abandon the plan.

Whatever the State wanted to extract from the public forest after 2013, it would have to extract by means other than sale. That is the part of the story the next decade tells.

Privatisation by other means

Three structures, in order of escalation.

In 2018, Coillte sold its stakes in four operating wind farms to Greencoat Renewables for €136 million. Coillte retained ownership of the underlying land. Greencoat acquired the right to operate the turbines and collect generation revenue for the long-term life of the assets. The State took the cash up front, in a single payment, and closed off any future participation in the revenue stream the public land continues to host. Greencoat is an Irish-incorporated, publicly-listed investment company. Its shareholders, in the years since the deal, have collected the long-term upside that public forest land was producing.

In November 2021, Coillte and ESB launched FuturEnergy Ireland, a 50:50 joint venture targeting one gigawatt of new wind capacity by 2030, with total investment requirements of around €1 billion. Coillte's renewable energy division and existing wind portfolio transferred into the joint venture in the fourth quarter of 2021. The joint venture is openly seeking external investors. The land hosting the projects is, in every case, Coillte land, which is to say public land. The shareholding of the vehicle generating revenue from that land is 50% ESB, 50% Coillte, and an unspecified future percentage of external private capital.

In January 2023, Gresham House, a London-listed asset manager, launched the Irish Strategic Forestry Fund. The fund's stated target capital was €200 million. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, the State's sovereign wealth vehicle, came in as cornerstone investor with €25 million. The fund's stated purpose was to acquire approximately 3,500 hectares of new afforestation land and a further 8,000 hectares of existing private forestry, building a long-term portfolio of around 12,000 hectares. The fund's operational manager, the entity contracted to source land, plant trees and manage the resulting forest portfolio over its multi-decade life cycle, was Coillte.

The pattern across the three structures is consistent and worth naming. A public asset hosts a long-term revenue stream. The revenue stream is captured into a vehicle in which the State is, variably, a minority financial participant, a vendor of a one-time stake or, in the Gresham House case, the operator working on behalf of the fund's investors. The land remains public. The financial value the land produces does not.

This is what operational capture looks like. It is what privatisation looks like when the State has already learned, from 2013, that it cannot privatise.

The defence the Tánaiste offered

When the Gresham House deal was announced in January 2023, opposition criticism was loud and organised. The Irish Wildlife Trust called the strategy a scandal. Labour, Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit publicly opposed it. Farm organisations warned that the fund would compete with farmers for land and accelerate rural depopulation.

The Tánaiste, Micheál Martin, responded in the Dáil on 19 January 2023. He told the chamber that there would be no privatisation of public land under the Coillte plan. He suggested alternative models could be explored. The Government and Coillte announced a few days later that future investment-fund structures would be reviewed.

The Tánaiste's statement was technically correct. The Irish Strategic Forestry Fund does not buy Coillte land. The fund acquires private land from private vendors. By the literal definition of privatisation, no public land was for sale, and none was sold.

The piece this article is making is that the Tánaiste's framing is the wrong question. Privatisation is a question about title. Operational capture is a question about who collects the upside of an asset over time. In the Gresham House structure, the State retains title to its existing forest estate, and the State's forestry agency operates a fund that collects long-term capital appreciation on newly acquired land for the benefit of private investors. Ask whether the underlying public asset has been sold and the answer is no. Ask whether the public is collecting the financial upside of its forestry agency's expertise, land-sourcing capacity and operational scale, and the answer is also no.

The Tánaiste said no privatisation. He did not say public capture. The two are not the same thing, and the State has learned to deliver the second without triggering opposition to the first.

Who paid for what, who got what

The same accounting the Wild Atlantic Way piece did, applied here.

Whose contribution to the value of these structures is uncompensated:

  • The public forest estate itself, transferred to Coillte in 1988 from a State Forestry Service that had built it over the preceding sixty-five years, on which the four sold wind farms operate, on which FuturEnergy Ireland's pipeline is being developed and on which Coillte's operational expertise as a fund manager was acquired. The Irish State did not buy this land in 1988. It re-categorised it.
  • Decades of public-sector forestry expertise, accumulated by foresters paid out of the Exchequer over generations of public-sector employment, now licensed implicitly to private fund vehicles every time Coillte agrees to operate on their behalf.
  • The State's planning system, environmental regulation, grid-connection allocation and afforestation grant scheme, all of which underwrite the financial returns of the private structures sitting on top of public land, none of which charge those structures for the externality.
  • The Irish public's customary expectation, never legally tested but durable across most of the twentieth century, that the public forest exists to generate public benefit. The 1988 Act notwithstanding.

Who captures the financial upside:

  • Greencoat Renewables' shareholders, on the four wind farms sold in 2018, for as long as the turbines turn.
  • FuturEnergy Ireland's joint venture partners, including ESB, and whatever external investors come in to fund the gigawatt build-out, on the new generation capacity sited on Coillte land.
  • Gresham House, as fund manager, on management fees collected over the multi-decade life of the Irish Strategic Forestry Fund. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, on its €25 million cornerstone, at whatever return profile the fund delivers. Other investors in the fund, on their stakes.

The Irish Exchequer takes a Coillte dividend that has ranged in recent years from €17 million to €30 million, on a forest estate of 440,000 hectares. The Wild Atlantic Way piece reported €3 billion in annual tourism revenue from a coast the State does not own. The State extracts least where it owns most. That is not an accident of accounting. It is what the structures are for.

The fix that would not be hard

None of what follows requires breaching EU competence. None of it requires confiscating private land or unwinding any existing contract. Each of the steps below is a single Ministerial direction, a single legislative amendment or a single Departmental disclosure decision.

Establish a statutory right of public access to the public forest, exercisable by walkers, runners, cyclists and other low-impact users, beyond the discretion of any Coillte byelaw. The Open Forest should be a legal commitment, not a brand line. The Forestry Act 1988 is the place to write it in. Section 37 is the section to amend.

Amend section 12 of the Forestry Act 1988 to permit, where the relevant Minister so directs, Coillte to operate on a non-commercial basis for biodiversity, climate, recreation or rural community objectives. The current Act allows non-commercial activity alongside the commercial mandate, but does not allow it to displace the commercial mandate. Change that.

Direct the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to fund afforestation through Coillte directly, using public capital, on public land, for public return, rather than via private fund vehicles. If EU state-aid rules constrain this, instruct the Department of Public Expenditure and the Department of Finance to challenge those rules at Council and Commission level rather than design around them.

Cap operational management of private forestry funds by Coillte. The State's forestry agency should not be permanently available as the operating arm of foreign-listed investment vehicles. If it is to be, the public should be told, through a published policy and a Dáil vote, with what mandate and what limits.

Disclose, in Coillte's annual report and in the published accounts of FuturEnergy Ireland, the full revenue and fee structure of every joint venture and fund-management arrangement. The public is the ultimate shareholder of these structures. The public is entitled to see the ledger.

Publish, complete and unedited, the public consultation responses received during the Project Woodland process in 2022, alongside a written explanation from the Department of Agriculture of how those responses informed the design of the Irish Strategic Forestry Fund. If the answer is that they did not, the explanation is shorter, but the public is still owed it.

Each of these is one piece of paper. Each is well within the constitutional and EU-law remit the Irish State has. The reasons none of them have happened are familiar. The Government has, on the available evidence, calculated that the structural argument is too dry to mobilise opposition to, and the Tánaiste's "no privatisation" line will hold long enough for the next deal to close.

The forest and the ledger

The Wild Atlantic Way piece closed on the brochure and the gate. This piece closes on the forest and the ledger, and it closes on two gates rather than one.

The forest is open this weekend. There are 12 forest parks, 6 mountain bike centres, 3,000 kilometres of marked trails and an Open Forest brand on every interpretive board. The harp is on the Coillte van that drives past you on the gravel road. None of this is a right. All of it is a permission Coillte issued and Coillte can withdraw, by company byelaw, without telling you in advance.

The ledger is closed. The fee structure of the Gresham House management contract is not published. The terms on which Greencoat acquired the four wind farms are commercially confidential. The investor list of FuturEnergy Ireland, when it secures one, will not be in your local newspaper. The flow of long-term capital appreciation from public land to private balance sheets is, by design, harder to see than a turnstile.

Two gates, then. The first is the company's discretion over your access to walk through public forest. The second is the company's discretion over who collects the financial value the public forest produces. Both gates were installed by the same Act in 1988, on the State's behalf. Both are closed in the directions that matter most to the public.

The next time you stand at the edge of a Coillte forest, you are looking at land that is yours by ownership and not yours by entitlement. The financial value of it is on a London-listed investment manager's balance sheet, accruing at a rate the public will never receive a dividend on. The walking access to it is at the discretion of a company that the State legislated, in 1988, to operate on a commercial basis.

That is not a failure of policy. That is the policy.

This piece is the second in a series on Irish land financialisation. The first examined the brand-and-access split on the Wild Atlantic Way. The next examines the Land Development Agency and the engineered transfer of public housing land into public-private partnership vehicles. Independent of any party. Sources for every claim available on request.