Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 13 July 2021
619. Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if his Department will prioritise private afforestation licences given Coillte has been issued its full allocation of felling licences for 2021; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [37439/21]
View answerI am committed to increasing licensing output across all categories and believe that the initiatives currently being worked on under Project Woodland will bear fruit in this regard. We have a business systems analyst carrying out an end-to-end review of the process and this will hopefully lead to recommendations for improvements. Furthermore, the Department will, in the near future, procure expertise to carry out a review of the regulatory and planning framework for forestry licensing which could yield further efficiencies. Other recommendations under consideration by the Project Board also have potential to assist with licensing outcomes.
The Department will continue to issue both private and Coillte licences so that the licensing requirements to supply timber for sawmills can be assured and that they can forward plan for their business.
Afforestation, road and private licences continue to be processed, but it is the case that more private felling licences have issued recently when compared to roads afforestation. The reason for this is the introduction of a system improvement for the preparation of Appropriate Assessment Screening Determinations, Appropriate Assessment Reports and Appropriate Assessment Determinations. Improvements have been made to the system to optimise the time of the ecologists to concentrate on the ecology aspects of each application. Currently, these improvements are only applied to private tree felling licence applications, which as mentioned has already yielded results with increased licences issued. The ecologists have been working mostly on these felling applications in advance of the system being developed further for other licensed activities.
In the coming days, the system will be rolled out for processing road files and the development of the system improvement to assist with processing afforestation files will commence over the next few weeks. Once this is in place, we should begin to see an increase in afforestation and roads licences, although the recent introduction of a second stage 30-day public consultation process for applications subject to Appropriate Assessment will have an impact on when we see this increase.
I would like to assure the Deputy that, along with my colleague Minister of State Pippa Hackett who has overall responsibility for forestry, I remain committed to issuing 4,500 forestry licences this year, which covers felling, afforestation and roads and which is an increase of 75% on 2020. This may prove challenging because of the new public consultation process but it remains our target.
