Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein)
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1134. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine his views on the way the number forestry licences with ecology input processed between November 2020 to February 2021 equates to one licence per ecologist per week given that 21 full-time equivalent ecologists have been employed; his views on whether this work rate is below that which is needed to address the crisis in the forestry sector; when the ecology target of 220 licences will be achieved; and the number of full-time ecologists that will be needed to achieve this target. [21352/21]

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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The licensing situation in the forestry sector continues to be our main challenge. We have committed to issuing 4,500 licences this year and that is still our intention.

While the current licensing situation is still not as we wish, this quarter has shown an improvement on the same period last year, with an increase of 24% on the number of licences issued.

The area of land approved for planting has improved with each passing month this year and we approved 1,300 hectares in the first three months of this year compared with 1,100 for the same period in 2020. In the last five weeks, our ecologists have prioritised afforestation files.

Forest Road licence approvals for the first three months of this year, at 76 kilometres are well over twice as much as the first three months of 2020 time last year.

Felling area and volume is also up when comparing with the first three months of last year. (1.7 million cubic metres approved compared with 1.1 million cubic metres)

We are taking on more staff to assist to deal with the situation and these will be supplemented by additional contract ecologists. Resources are not our only focus. We have just introduced a new system for streamlining the preparation of documents which inform the Appropriate Assessment process, which removes some of the manual non ecology tasks. This process is currently live for felling files and will soon be rolled out to road and then afforestation files. While we are still going through the early training and testing stages the early signs are good in terms of the potential the new system has to increase the rate at which files are processed. No doubt, further refinements to the system will be identified as part of the process review. Both additional resources and systems improvements will increase output to ensure we reach the target of 4,500 licences in 2021.