Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their comments and observations. I appreciate and accept how worried the committee is about the future of forestry. It is not only the future of the sector but certainly the future of us meeting targets and dealing with our climate ambitions. Everyone is concerned about it and certainly, the recent comments of Ms Marie Donnelly in terms of how we are reaching our targets show that the Climate Change Advisory Council, CCAC, is also very concerned about this. Everyone ultimately wants to get to a position where we are not concerned anymore.

Deputy Cahill and Senator Paul Daly both commented on what went wrong, and how people will look back to 2021 and ask what went wrong. We were, unfortunately, in breach of environmental regulations and it set us back. It has taken us this amount of time to try to build back up from grinding to a halt, essentially, to putting in systems and processes that work and that deliver the licences we need. We are not there yet but we are certainly delivering licences within the very tough environmental requirements that exist. There is really no getting around that. We cannot short-cut environmental regulations. We cannot just say to the EU that we are going to ignore those few directives and fire out licences. That is the brunt of why we are where we are.

The officials in my Department are working incredibly hard to move towards systems that function and that not only deliver licences as quickly as possible and on time but also meet the environmental requirements. That is the crux of the issue. That is what we will have to say to our future generations about what happened in the early 2020s. That is what happened. Hopefully, by the time we move on a number of years, we will be out of that. We will look back 20 or 30 years and see this blip and we will have moved on. We will be able to issue licences in an absolutely timely manner in order that people, farmers and landowners will actually use the licences to plant.

I will come back to ash dieback in a moment and deal with the other bits. I appreciate Deputy Cahill's welcoming comments with regard to the dashboard, which I think is useful. We have added other key performance indicators, KPI, to that this year. The balance between Coillte licences versus private licences keeps coming up as an issue. It comes up in parliamentary questions all the time. The simple fact of the matter is that Coillte supplies 75% of the timber to the sawmill sector so on the whole, it is going to deliver more timber. It is not that it is favoured as such but that the licences that come in through Coillte do so in a batch. We do not get them weekly; they come in one big batch so they can be processed in a more straightforward manner. They go through the exact same process as any licence, however. It has to go through the same processes regardless of whether it is a Coillte licence or private licence. I accept that the figures are a little bit down in the first quarter thus far in terms of delivery for private licences. The projections for the year for private licences are actually in excess of 1,800. The overall licence projections for this year are 1,830 private felling licences and 1,530 Coillte felling licences. As the year progresses, therefore, we will certainly see a turnaround in terms of private licences being issued.

One thing to comment on with regard to private licences is that Coillte licences are all for certified timber. Sawmills are required to take in quite a high proportion - approximately two thirds or 75% - of certified timber. They cannot sell it on to their customers. Some larger private owners have certified forests and their timber will be certified. A large proportion of private forest owners do not have certified timber. If, for the sake of argument, we were to only do private licences and no Coillte licences, that timber would not be able to be sold on to the market because it is not certified. In one sense, we need the buffer of the certified timber plus the uncertified private timber to feed into the market. This is going to be an issue we need to look into. We certainly need to engage with the private sector. That is something we need to undertake as a Department to help private growers in the future become certified. We are going to see it flipping over in terms of the volumes coming from the private sector over the next five or ten years. That is an important thing to say.

I know thinning licences are an issue about which people get frustrated but thinning is still an activity. Trees could have been in position for quite a number of years - maybe a decade and a half or thereabouts.

While it might be a plantation management issue, it is not recognised as that. It is still quite an invasive piece of work on a piece of land and that is why, unfortunately, it still has to go through the licensing process. This is one of the issues examined in the regulatory review and we are teasing out if there is anything we can do on it, but we probably cannot do much.

Senator Lombard raised the timelines. I am aware that timelines exist for other planning processes. We simply cannot issue a licence without having gone through the appropriate environmental requirements. At best, what we could do is issue a timeline and then say we cannot give the licence. We could not say the person is getting it just because we have spent eight months on it. That would not wash; we would not be able to do that. We would be back in the High Court as quickly as someone could say "licence". The system review we are looking at is to try to make the system more effective. We have to be much more efficient. We cannot have people waiting for months and months. We are working on that. While it might not be something to jump up and down about, the fact that we will get rid of all pre-2021 licences by the second quarter, or that is the plan, is significant. It is incredibly frustrating for people who are sitting on a licence for two to three years, albeit it is a small number.

We are working on getting that timeline reduced all the time. If we can get to the middle of this year and say the longest licence we have in the system is now 18 months, that would be an improvement. We are constantly working on removing those durations because it is unacceptable that people have to wait ridiculous lengths of time. I do not know the figure for how many touch points there are when one adds up all the bits in how long it takes to get a licence. There could be ten or 15 different touch points and each one of those takes a certain time. Some are quicker than others depending on, perhaps, the quality of the licence and some depend on the area the licence is coming from. There is no one brushstroke that can fix all the different touch points, but we are working on making each touch point as short as possible. That is ultimately where we want to get to, without undermining the requirements under environmental law.

There were one or two other points. Senator Lombard raised the importation of roundwood. We only import roundwood from one particular area of Scotland, which is biosecure. It is the only place from which we are allowed to import. In terms of biosecurity, we like to think that we are as sound as we can be on that. We have always imported timber albeit we imported more than we ever did last year. That dropped off around Christmas and we have kept it quite low. To date in 2022, we have imported the lowest volume for the first quarter. We will probably always need to import some. It is fair to say that we are net exporters of wood. We export approximately 80% of what we grow or it is manufactured into something and exported, but for certain types of structural pieces we cannot grow the species here. We probably have to import some to export more, if the Senator knows what I mean.