Senator Pippa Hackett:

As I mentioned earlier, many of these amendments are duplicates of those that were tabled in the Seanad last week. I am disappointed we are not getting an opportunity to debate them fully and in time. If Deputy Cairns is concerned about one particular amendment she tabled that is essentially the same as an amendment in the Seanad last week, then the debate is there and my views and those of the Government still stand. We will not have changed our views on those duplicate amendments from last week to this week.

I will go back to the points on the timing. Even if there was a fixed time in the Bill and even if an appeal had not been heard, it would not fall and it would still exist. All we would do is put pressure on that FAC and open it up to scrutiny that it would not be able to cope with at this stage. Deputy Pringle asked where the provision was in the legislation. Section 14E(1)(f) provides for a statutory instrument to be written to insert a time limit if we deem it necessary. That would not be for one particular appeal or another. It would be across the board.

To go back to Deputy Boyd Barrett's comments about appeals, all forestry licences can be appealed. It is not only for afforestation, felling or roads. If they are appealed, they all go through the same committee and the committee does not determine which appeals it will look at. The same FAC will hear all of those appeals. If it is of any use, we are willing to offer that once the Bill is hopefully enacted, after six months we could submit a report to the Oireachtas based on how the six months of the subdivisions of the appeals committee has functioned, perhaps in advance of any statutory instrument on applying a time limit for how quickly the appeals would be made and conducted.

The purpose of this Bill is to make the forestry appeals committee more efficient and effective and the main provision for that is to subdivide it. We currently have one committee examining all appeals. If more than 400 appeals are sitting in the FAC and waiting to be heard, the current legislation only provides for one appeal to be looked at. The most significant aspect of the legislation is to allow that to subdivide. If we can populate the FAC and subdivide it into groups of two for each committee, we could have three or four committees. That would be a fourfold increase in the number of appeals being heard. Hopefully, the FAC will hear multiple appeals within a week.

We can discuss the timeline being three months or six months but we should give the process a chance. If it is not working, we will have to review it, and I do not want it to get to a stage where jobs are lost in the forestry sector. This is ultimately why we are up against it in terms of time and why we do not have the time to discuss the Bill properly. It is a crisis and it is emergency legislation.

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