Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 20 May 2021
378. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the reason the total forestry licences issued by his Department has declined in recent weeks; the reason the significant reduction in Coillte licences has not lead to an increase in the number of private licenses issued; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [27310/21]
View answerOur overall target for the year remains at 4,500 new licences. There will be fluctuations between months as was the case for April which was lower than previous months. I expect May to be higher for new licences and for this to increase further into June and beyond.
There are a number of factors which influenced the April figure. Among these are that, for a short period, ecologists focussed almost exclusively on afforestation files and these files are normally slower to bring to completion.
The main reason for the decline in licence output however has been largely due to a decline in the output of Coillte licences. This is because Coillte had received almost all of their 2021 felling licences. My Department received just over 2,000 licence applications in the 2019 and 2020 batches.
By March 2021, licensing decisions had been made for the vast majority of these. At present only nine remain with decisions on five of these due this week. The near total completion of 2019 and 2020 batches, thereby reducing the number of available applications to work on, is the main reason why there has been a decline in the number of licences issued recently.
A new batch of 1,864 applications from Coillte, was received by the Department on 15th March 2021. There is a huge amount of background work involved in the licensing process long before a licence issues and this is currently ongoing. Pre-licensing work on these new applications began immediately with applications advertised and referrals made to District Forestry Inspectors and third parties such as County Councils.
Some preliminary screening also took place for Appropriate Assessment and all applications were successfully uploaded to the Forestry Licence Viewer, making them accessible to the public. We also used the opportunity to issued new licences that were remitted to the Department by FAC for a new decision. We do not count these as new licences in our weekly output in order to avoid double-counting.
