Ms Carol Toolan:

I thank the Deputy for the question. As Dr. Cahill said, we are currently going through the appeals side of things with the Office of the Attorney General to sort out and tighten up the timeframes. The idea behind the internal review is to address the fact that the exporters may need a timely response, as referred to by the Deputy. The internal review would offer them a quick and less expensive way of having either their licence or a compliance notice checked by an officer of a higher level, or a different officer, just to have a different point of view on it. The external panel is a matter on which we are also going into detail with the Attorney General to determine how it might operate in respect of timeframes and so on.

The idea behind that is to offer an independent mechanism for the exporter so the decisions of the authorised officer, or of the deciding officer in the case of licences, would be reviewed by somebody completely independent and external to the Department.