Dr. Cecil Beamish:

It cannot move at the same pace straight off. Simply saying that we will do 300 licences does not do the 300 licence determinations that have to be done. All the building blocks will have to be delivered to do that.

I will now respond to the questions put by Senator Lombard. We had a discussion earlier on the infrastructure that had to be built to enable licensing to happen. That is largely now in place. That is what enables a stepping up of the licensing process. In itself it does not achieve it but it does enable it.

In his contribution Senator Lombard spoke in terms of the role of Teagasc in an advisory capacity where it advises applicants for grants and so forth. BIM does that in the seafood area. BIM works with applicants on the preparation for grant and other schemes, advising on how the schemes run and how they apply. The issue of BIM working in an express way on the pre-application process is that BIM is a statutory consultee when that application comes in at present. BIM helps the Department on some of the things that we might need to do. I spoke earlier on the underwater archaeology earlier. It seems to us that if BIM were to do the kind of pre-application role that farm advisers may do, that would seem to have implications for any post application involvement. It is a question of the balance of advantage. Is the balance of advantage to make that move at this time when one is trying to up the rate of decision determination?