Professor Frank O'Mara:

The apprenticeship programme is a great initiative, one that we are very pleased with and committed to. It will be there in addition to our current education programmes for young farmers. I will ask Dr. Butler to speak about the roll-out in a moment, and she can probably deal with the staffing issue in more detail. We have enough staff in place to get the programmes up and running. Some of them have started – Dr. Butler will outline those in a minute – and others are due to get started in the next few weeks. We hope to get additional posts sanctioned by the Department. That will be important as the programme ramps up. We will take in one cohort of apprentices this year. It is a two-year programme. We will be due to take in a second cohort next year, and then we will be up to full speed with a year 1 and a year 2. It will take a while to ramp up to full activity. We will need additional staff by the time we start taking in a second cohort of apprentices. Dr. Butler will provide more detail on where we are now and what staffing we have in place.