Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I will make one quick point. First of all, this is a contested sector, and people have different views about forestry. Some people want us to plant trees, and some people do not. Some people want a commercial sector, and some people do not. Everybody has a legitimate interest in this, and a legitimate perspective. There were all kinds of suggestions flying around about what we could and could not do, including whether we could drop the licensing requirement for roads or the licensing requirement for harvesting. After all, it seems ludicrous that we would allow people to plant the trees and then require a licence for harvesting. In principle, perhaps that does seem ludicrous, but it is not permissible under the law. The environmental conditions might have changed in the meantime, 30 years on. One of the things we did was to get an independent regulatory review done to identify what was possible and what was not possible. That came up with a series of recommendations, and we have an action plan to work through them and try to deal with them. Some of them might simplify some of this process, but it is complex legal stuff. What got us into the position that we are in now was a court judgment in 2018 that said we were non-compliant. We operated in good faith, and as far as we were concerned we were doing the right thing. When an application came in, we judged the need for an appropriate assessment against taking the mitigating actions in the application into account. In other words, we knew about appropriate assessment, but if the application provided for mitigating actions to mitigate the environmental risk, we took that into account when we screened it for appropriate assessment. However, the court judgment held that the mitigating actions cannot be taken into account. I do not want to plunge into some system now that will see us ending up in court in five years' time, and having a client base which is plunged into uncertainty again. I want to be absolutely certain and clear with people that we need to have a regulatory framework that is robust and will stand up to scrutiny and judicial review. I can tell the committee that it will be contested.