Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will ask some individual questions for the officials in my five-minute slot. The weekly dashboard in November shows that the Department issued only 84 private licences. That does not reflect the Department's target of reaching 200 files. In November, the committee was informed that 16 ecologists had been hired and at the time there were 84 files on hand. Each ecologist was dealing with five files per month or one file per week. How much are the extra ecology resources costing the Department and the taxpayer? I do not believe there is good value for the taxpayer here, particularly when one considers the number of ecologists versus the number of files being processed.