Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (Senator Pippa Hackett):

I thank the Deputy for the question. The current issues in forestry licencing arise for various reasons, not least EU and national court judgments, which required a significant change to our licencing system. I have made forestry a key priority within my portfolio and my Department has been, and is working, urgently to accelerate the pace at which licences are issued to ensure a robust system is in place for licencing that meets all of the legal and environmental requirements. Together with the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, I have met with many stakeholders and continue to meet with them on this and to engage intensively with all parties as we try to resolve this.

We have undertaken a number of urgent and significant steps to resolve matters in recent months. We implemented a detailed project management plan for dealing with the files and recruited a project manager to oversee this. We have invested and continue to invest in new resources. We now have 16 full-time equivalent ecologists working on forestry licencing. We continue to recruit ecologists and will be adding to this team very soon. We have increased the number on the forestry inspectorate team dealing with licences. We recruited ten new permanent forestry inspectors and they will join the Department's team very shortly, with four of them starting this week. They have been supplemented by four temporary forestry inspectors and all are immediately allocated to working on licencing. Finally, additional administration staff have been assigned to licencing to help and I am keeping all of these resources under review.

This investment is already resulting in significantly improved output. October and November were the highest months this year for licence output, with almost 600 new licences issued in those months. Licencing for felling with a volume of some 1.4 million tonnes were issued in that time. This is almost as much as the previous five months combined. I anticipate these positive trends to continue into December and beyond.

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