Mr. Colm Hayes:

I will have to get the committee a breakdown of that figure. Obviously, they are all new hectares, not hectares that have been replanted after clear felling. In some cases, they are owned by people who planted once upon a time and have come back in with more land. As to whether the hectares are brand new, I will have to check and respond directly to the Deputy, but I assure him that they are all private lands and not Coillte lands.

Regarding April, our headline target remains 4,500 new licences for the year. As we told the committee in January, there will be fluctuations between weeks and months, but we are not resiling from the overall headline target for 4,500 new licences. The amount will not be uniform each week. The Deputy asked why April was a low month. That was for a number of reasons. Primarily, we did not have Coillte licences to issue because Coillte had received all of its 2021 felling licences by the end of January or thereabouts. It is fully licensed for 2021. Our team that works on Coillte licences was doing a great deal of background work on the 1,800 new Coillte licences. The dashboard measures output in terms of licences, but there is also a large piece of work that goes on in the background. We were also making some background IT changes as well as process improvements that will increase output. Those improvements are starting to come through now. They came through last week with 101 new licences. There will be a very high amount this week as well. It will be higher than the average, although I will not know the figure for sure until Friday evening. I expect the situation to be the same next week and the week after into June. We have in some respects retrieved May, but April was a disappointingly low month. We have outlined some of the reasons for that.

I assure Deputy Flaherty that we are not discounting any month of the year. Licences will issue every week this year, as they did last year, including Christmas week. There should be no downturn at any point. We will continue to put our shoulders to the wheel.

The target of 4,500 licences requires an output of approximately 100 per week, as the Chairman outlined at the start. We are well aware of the metric and we believe that can be delivered.

Deputy Carthy mentioned, and I agree with him fully, that any applicant who applies for a forestry licence should have some degree of certainty as to how long it will take for that licence to be received. We have fallen down in providing that certainty. There are people who applied for afforestation licences and received them a month later but there will be those who will have to wait significantly longer. Regarding the targets of approximately three months for afforestation licences and four months for felling, we have fallen behind on those. The average length of time for the issuing of those licences is not at those figures, and it absolutely should be. We expect detailed recommendations from the working groups and Project Woodland. This has been highlighted, in particular, by Jo O’Hara in her report. She called on those groups, as did the Minister, to deliver those metrics. We expect recommendations on how those groups believe they should be achieved. We are not at the stage where we can guarantee a turnaround time for those.

We have reached a point in our licensing system where are issuing more licences to date this year than applications received. This is a good place to be but it does not deal with the licences that are on hand and the backlog. The priority must be to drive down those figures. Reaching a point where we are issuing more licences than applications received is a good indicator of the future. Right now, the output of 100 licences is required to drive down the backlog. Those who have waited longer than they should have, need to hear that and understand that this is where our effort is going.

There was a question from Deputy Carthy on the 15 km zone of influence in terms of appropriate assessment. I will pass that question, with the Chairman’s agreement, to Mr. Seamus Dunne, chief forestry inspector, to provide more information on that.