Mr. Pádraig Egan:

I thank the members for the questions. I am going to answer the Senator's questions but I might very briefly respond to the Deputy. I know I have to be careful, Chairman, about the three positions we were speaking about. There is nothing personal in it. We are out running businesses. We do not have time to be in here. We want to be out on the ground doing what we are supposed to do. We are in here because the Department is just not able to deliver. As Mr. Ryan said, all we want is a workable system. We would be happy if we got approvals within four or six months. Say the Deputy is a farmer who asks me to plant his land for him. I will meet him and we will go through all the application process and I will tell him everything that is good about forestry. However, I will want to get out his door before he asks me the question how long this is going to take. That is because I do not have a clue, and I do not have a clue because we do not have a workable system, a planning process or any right policies. Why is that? It is because of the people we just spoke about. It is nothing personal. Our businesses have been run into the ground by the same three or four who have been in charge of this industry for the past ten years. I wanted to make that point.

Senator Daly asked about ash. It is a serious concern. As we all know, ash is our favourite tree. We all love hurling as well and it is what we make our hurls from, but a lot of people planted ash here in the past 20 or 30 years. If you planted ash and you now have this ash disease, first of all, you have to ask where it came from. We are an island nation. Ten, 15 or 20 years ago a professor came to this country - I cannot remember exactly but we can look it up - and explained to the people that, down the road, ash dieback was coming across Europe from Latvia. We are an island nation. The prevailing winds go a particular way. We had a chance to keep Ireland free. The people in charge of biosecurity, that is, of monitoring diseases of trees and plants being brought in, are the same three or four people we were talking about in the forest service. They did nothing. They brought it in from England and they brought it in from everywhere. That is where the disease came from. They could say, or members could, that we are blaming them for everything but those are the facts of it. A professor came here 15 or 20 years ago and told them this. They took no heed of it because they take no heed of anything they are told.

Moving to the landowners the Senator talked about and from whom he is inundated with representations, let us say a landowner in Westmeath, where the Senator comes from, has planted ash and it is 20 years old and gets ash dieback. There is now a scheme called the RUS. The forest service again did not consult us or any other stakeholder and just pushed that out there. It is not fit for purpose because, as the Chairman said, it will pay for taking out and replanting the trees, but if you had 20-year-old forestry and you put a new sapling in the ground, you are back to day one.

There would be no income for the next 20 years under the RUS. It is not fit for purpose and it was just thrown out there.

I can quickly give a figure on that. Up to March 2022 or thereabouts, there were 608 applications for the ash dieback scheme covering 2,500 ha, which is nearly 6,000 acres. To date, only 186 approvals have been issued covering 600 ha. There are 422 applications still stuck down the road. It is typical that they are not being processed.