Mr. Colm Hayes:

I will clarify for the Deputy. We have three strands to our licensing programme. There is the Coillte strand and then there are two different categories of licence. The Deputy referred to November when 84 files came off the project plan. There were, however, 91 other private licences that also issued in November. These did not go near the ecology private plan. That is 175 licences for the private sector for the month of November. I am glad to have the opportunity to clarify that. The project plan is one subset of the overall licences and the average of about 300 licences per month since October is made up of Coillte, private ecology and private non-ecology. In private licence terms, when one combines the two for the month of November, it was some 175 licences.

There is no question that those figures would not have been achieved without the input of the resources and the additional ecologists. The starting salary for an ecologist is approximately €32,000, but I would have to check that figure for the Deputy. This might give the committee an indication of the costs involved. There is no way we were going to get from the base where we were to 300 licences a month without that investment in resources. As an investment it is growing. The committee will receive our dashboard on Monday for the month of January, but I expect the figure for January to be somewhere around 350 licences. Again, this dwarfs anything we did in any month last year. It is a process of continual improvement. Ecologists come in, they must be trained and they have to get up to speed. When they do get up to speed, it starts to come through. It is from October, November and December onward that we start to see the benefit. The onus is on us to take that to the next level for the remainder of the year.