Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I agree with the Chairman on the number of licences and funnily enough in the last two weeks it has increased again but we must take what is said to us verbatim. I read Mr. Gleeson's opening statement and listened to him. He referred to the Sweetman case in 2018. Mr. Gleeson is probably aware that at the biogeographical conference in 2004, Ireland submitted 832 sites that were adopted as sites of community importance. Mr. Gleeson is probably aware that in 2010 and 2011, on the Department's website, copied from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Department stated it was going to comply with all parts of the habitats directive. Why did it take until 2018 for the Department to come back and use all this stuff about the legal stuff that went on in 2018 and the different cases with us today? This was here six years before that. In actual fact, it was here 12 to 14 years before that. I, as a bog cutter, knew about it in 2009. Why did the Department not deal with it before it came to a head in 2018?