Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I will address a couple of points in that. I do not know how to rebut Deputy Carthy's assertion. Perhaps the Deputy is not making an assertion but rather is drawing a pattern from what we have issued, which is fair enough. I cannot say definitively how many licences we will issue next week or the week after. I am confident that we will issue in or around the figure of 100 licences over the next three weeks. That is my view. It is our ambition to continue with a consistently high level of licensing after that. Every licence involves an individual application. We do not have a production line. We have ecologists who look at these matters in a serious way. If they did not do so, we would have a bigger problem perhaps, although it would not be in the coming weeks. In the short term it might solve a problem over the coming months but in the long term we would end up with another judicial review or be back in the courts again.