Mr. Teddy Cashman:

The gun clubs have been central in developing the thoughts and process around this. The National Association of Regional Game Councils, NARGC, is the association of national gun clubs. It has been very involved in the process. I spoke to them out in south Galway. They are involved on all the different committees we had, as were all the other country organisations such as the Irish Deer Commission, the Irish Deer Society, the Deer Alliance Ireland, and the Wild Deer Association of Ireland. Quite a few of them out there are involved with deer management.

There is a point to be made around the deer issue and registered hunters. There are 6,000 registered hunters who have their hunting licence as of 2023. It is registered hunters who are able to do the proper deer stalking. It is about tying up with the local people and the proper registered deer hunters to get the job done. If a deer management unit is set up and one gets goodwill going, then one can get a lot done in a short space of time without a whole lot of money to begin with. To get it to the next phase where there is a really large number to be taken out is when we would probably need to put incentives in place. One of the logjams in that is dealing with the venison coming out of this if we start to accelerate the cull. We will need to address that immediately after Christmas as to what options are needed around that.