Joanne Collins (Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the Minister and thank him for giving of his time to be here. I have just two or three points to make. The first is on the delays to ACRES payments. The Minister has said he is now more or less on top of the issue. I know it came down to IT issues. Can he give assurances that these delays will not continue? Much of the backlog has been covered but, given that it took so much time to do that, has the possibility of future backlogs been looked at? Are there extra staff in those departments to make sure it does not happen again?

What happens when schemes go wrong? Under the ash dieback scheme that is in place, some landowners are being asked to get extra reports done before felling their trees. They would have had an ecological report done to plant them and now, because ash dieback has hit, they are being asked for another ecological report to fell them even though it is still the same land. They are having to pay upfront for these reports to be done and some of them are costing up to €2,000.

My last question is also on forestry. How is the Minister going to square the circle as regards GAEC? We are trying not to plant on peatlands but a junior Minister is advocating not only to continue planting on peatlands, but to increase it. As the Minister will know, that goes against GAEC.