Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

These difficulties have been well ventilated in other forums. In 2018 we had a court case, the result of which was that we had to move from putting 3% of applications through appropriate assessment for environmental reasons to 80%. The reality is that the Department just was not set up to do that. Since then, we have greatly increased the resources in that area. We have taken on, at various times, up to 37 ecologists to go through those applications and to do the appropriate assessments.

Separately, we had a system of appeals which became logjammed because, for a period, every single Coillte licence was being appealed. We have revised our appeals system and that appeals backlog is now gone.

The Minister established Project Woodland to work with the sector and to work through all of these issues, and quite a number of things were done in that context. The principal thing is that we recognised there are competing land uses in forestry and that we would have to provide very generous incentives to people to engage in forestry and to ensure we had a licensing system that was functional.