Additional staff are to be drafted in at the Department of Agriculture to process forestry licence applications.
The process has been beset by significant delays, with the industry saying timber shortages were possible if issues were not resolved.
The Minister of State with responsibility for Forestry, Senator Pippa Hackett, has published details of the number of applications currently being processed, saying that her department would continue to "invest and recruit" in order to increase the number of approvals issued.
According to a statement issued by the department, there are 4,700 forest licence applications currently in the system.
Minister Hackett has said that 2,000 have been referred to ecologists for an "appropriate assessment".
The minister acknowledges that a "backlog has built up over the last 18 months" but says that a dedicated project plan was addressing the delays.
She said that the remaining 2,700 licences in the system are not subject to the same delays as licences requiring what she called "ecology input".
The Department of Agriculture has issued 2,330 new licences so far in 2020.
Nearly 600 of those licences were issued since the introduction of the new forestry legislation at the beginning of October.
The legislation was introduced to deal with the delays in granting licences.
In a statement this afternoon, the Director of Forest Industries Ireland, Mark McAuley, said: "The 4,700 applications in the Department's backlog is an astronomical figure. There are no licences that are not experiencing long delays.
"The Department has fallen far, far behind and has not managed to make any inroads into the backlog; in fact the backlog is growing. The Department is consistently missing its own targets and is way off the industry requirement."
Mr McAuley said the industry needs "500 felling licences each and every month" from the Department, and unless they can produce that figure, they will always be behind.
He said the industry requirement has not changed just because the process has changed, and the new system must be able to produce licences in the same way as the old system.
"Our industry is on its knees and thousands of jobs are at stake. If we can't get our raw material, then the industry is dead on its feet."
