Mr. Gerry Egan:

What one is doing in effect is collecting cash today for timber that would ordinarily be harvested 25 or 30 years in the future. This generates cash which one is in a position to invest today. At the time when the funds commenced, that money would have been used by Coillte to buy the 64,000 hectares of land it purchased for afforestation purposes. There is no mystery. What Coillte was doing was trying to facilitate investment in Ireland by people who were interested in investing in forest assets. To do this, it was necessary to introduce some type of mature forests into these funds. The other fund I mentioned has been largely invested in by the National Pensions Reserve Fund. These issues are all a matter of public record. There is nothing underhand in any respect about them.

On the environmental issues, I will, if I may, give an umbrella response. Since 2001, Coillte has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as managing our forests responsibly. Every year a team of auditors from the Soil Association in the UK, which is one of the large certifiers of organic farming and so on, comes to Ireland and puts Coillte through a rigorous process of assessment in terms of forest management practices based on 85 different environmental, social and economic criteria, including the harvesting systems we use, safety practices, inventory processes, species planted, clear felling activities and so on.

We are in a position where our forest management practices have been certified for 12 years and are put through the ringer annually to ensure we continue to hold on to it. We have that kind of external validation, with in the region of 350,000 ha of forest internationally certified to the same standard. That is as much as I can offer in reply to that. Mr. Britchfield will speak to Coillte's commercial mandate.