Mr. Kevin Collins:

I apologise to Deputy Browne and thank the Minister of State. I will point to some significant changes that have happened within the licensing process over the last couple of months. We in the Department and the Minister of State are quite frustrated that, when we were just a couple of percentage points off our target for June, we then had to deal with SI 293 of 2021. The figures for June represented the momentum that had been built arising from the dramatic upscaling of our ecological resources. It takes time for these to bed in and for people to be trained in them. We had learned from our work on the Coillte licences and were beginning to apply what we had learned in the area of private licences through appropriate assessment assist, or AA assist.

If I may take one brief moment to explain, we have really valuable ecologists who are key in considering files to ensure that decisions meet the requirements of the habitats directive and are robust. We wanted to make sure they spent their time looking at ecological issues exclusively. This new process, AA assist, generates the material in draft format by pulling material from various spatial sources and so on and presents documentation to the ecologists, who then use it as the basis for their assessment. We were beginning to see the efficiencies in June as a result of the ecologists coming up to speed, of AA assist beginning to bed in and of a separate triaging process that was under way whereby five or six inspectors were looking at more than 1,400 licence applications to see if they could be tidied up before they went to the ecologists. It was interesting to see that approximately 50% of these applications had to be returned as further information was required. These licence applications were intercepted. Previously they might have gone on to the ecologists, whose time would have been wasted trying to-----