Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am very disappointed with the response offered by the Minister and Minister of State. It is absolutely ridiculous that they would try to sell the story to us that it will be left up to the Minister to decide when an appeal will be dealt with. We are asking for a timeline on behalf of the people involved. They are depending on us to ensure that they get fair play but it looks like the Minister and Minister of State are not going to give them that.

If I understood him right, the Minister said that at a later stage, when things cool down a bit, he might put in a timeline. I am not sure whether he even said that much. What he is forgetting is that the appeals are going to keep coming. The blackguards will keep blackguarding and they are not going to stop just because the Minister says he has passed a Bill. The Bill is worthless as it stands if he does not put in a timeline. Maybe he should tell the fellows sending in appeals that until we get up and running and get a timeline in place, no more appeals will be taken. The Minister is the powers that be in this case. The Taoiseach signed a statutory instrument that will allow penalty points to be imposed on fishermen. Can he not sign another statutory instrument to the effect that no more felling licence appeals will be accepted until the backlog is cleared, the people who are waiting for licences get them and work is again going on in the normal fashion that it did until two years ago? He can then decide to resume appeals when they can be dealt with.

The reality is that the Minister cannot deal with the appeals coming into his Department and he has no notion of doing so if he is not going to impose a deadline in respect of them. He should put a stop to them for now and get the Taoiseach to sign a statutory instrument to that effect. Maybe the Minister could sign it himself. The time for blackguarding is over and it is time to sort this out one way or the other. We need to stop any new appeals coming in for now to allow the backlog to be cleared. The people making the appeals are not going to stop. At the rate they are going, the whole thing will close down in one slap altogether and the Minister will be remembered forever for it. A previous Government closed the sugar factory in Mallow and it will never be forgotten that it did so. If this Government closes down the timber industry and the whole business of cutting timber, taking it to sawmills and cutting it up for roofing houses, people will not forget it. If the Government presides over that, it will take a fair hammering at some stage. Nobody knows who will survive and get through the next election.

We are all trying to do our best here but I can see that the Government is not listening to us on this very serious issue. We are talking about an area of production that has been achieved on very marginal rural land that was good for absolutely nothing else. Governments gave people grants to plant the trees and it is only right that those people would presume that if they got a grant to plant them, then they should be allowed to cut down the trees. We are asking the Minister to deal with the blackguards. There may be a very small number of people who have genuine concerns and we want to assist them. However, that is not what is going on when we have fellows 200 miles away from Kerry appealing and holding up the granting of a felling licence there. That is truly wrong. There are parents who want to sell their forestry to pay for their children to go to college. I know a woman whose husband has been in a wheelchair for two years since he had a stroke. She wants to sell a bit of forestry to get the money to adapt the house for him. There are several cases like these right under our noses. The man beside me has a haulage set-up and he is depending on timber to be felled. He cannot draw it if it is not cut. There are several thousand workers right around us who are affected by this. We have very little in rural parts of Kerry but there is forestry production. It is all going to go for nothing.

The Minister must do something to reduce the volume of appeals coming into the Department. The reason he gave for not putting in a deadline is not acceptable. We do not accept that it should be left up to the Minister.

There are hundreds of applications going in. A Minister will not deal with those, and will not want to deal with them. It would be too onerous and complicated. The Minister must include in the Bill a deadline for deciding on appeals and block any further appeals until that is in place. Surely he has enough common sense to see that. The Government is talking about allowing a Minister to make a decision on each appeal. God help us.

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