Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 8 December 2020
31. Deputy Sean Sherlock asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the additional steps he will take to protect the 12,000 jobs under threat in the forestry sector; and the assurances he will give that the deployment of additional resources is sufficient to deal with the current backlog of forestry-related applications. [41874/20]
View answerWhat improvements have taken place regarding licence applications since the legislation was enacted in October? I welcome the fact that the Minister of State has appointed Jo O'Hara to oversee the Mackinnon report and advise the Minister. The industry and anybody who is a stakeholder will welcome that appointment. However, one would have to look at that appointment in a medium to long-term perspective. There are approximately 5,000 applications clogged up in the system. What is the Minister of State doing to get that unclogged?
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.
Notwithstanding the fact the Minister of State stated there are 16 full-time equivalents now appointed as ecologists and ten new forestry inspectors, what hope can the she give to my constituent, who is probably typical of constituents throughout the country? That person has been waiting more than 900 days for a licence and has been told that, if that person was to expend a considerable amount of their own resources on a Natura impact statement, it "might" quicken the process? What comfort can I give my constituent? Nine hundred days for an application is too long. What can I tell this constituent after this discussion? What hope can the Minister of State give that person?
Nine hundred days is a long time to wait for a licence. The advice I imagine the constituent has been given is that supplying a Natura impact statement would expedite the licence application. I accept that there is a cost associated with that. I do not know the constituent's details. If the area is small, the cost of supplying a statement could be prohibitive. If it is a large area, however, the constituent might be able to it.
In light of the advice the Deputy outlined, I imagine the person's licence application is in the backlog in the ecology section. Thanks to resources, we are seeing a large increase in that section's output. We will continue to work on that.
Are the 16 full-time equivalents on permanent contracts? The Minister of State mentioned that she intended to recruit more ecologists. Will they be employed on a full-time equivalent basis? Will there be a permanent staff as opposed to external staff who are brought in on a contractual basis? Will the Minister of State give assurances that all staff hired will be on a full-time equivalent basis so that we can ensure that staff are retained within the service to get through every felling licence application expeditiously?
According to the figures I have been provided, there will be a mix. We have recruited full-time staff. There are 16 full-time equivalents and we have sanction for eight additional permanent ecologists. Given the way we are going now, ecologists comprise a discipline that we will need more of across the board, not just in forestry. There is not a steady supply of them. In that regard, I would be interested in seeing more being done in education, training and development.
