Mr. Maurice Quinn:

We have a very significant inventory holding in the Department of Defence. It is the biggest in the State. Our main objective is to ensure that we have the right inventory for the Defence Forces at hand when they need it in an appropriate quantity, which means not too much and not too little. We have done a huge amount of work on that. Senior management resources and teams work on how we are managing our inventory to drive as many savings as we can to get the right levels. One will always have a situation in the military where there is inventory that is never used. That is because we are a contingent capacity on behalf of the State. There is a whole range of scenarios to which the military must be in a position to respond. As such, inventory is not managed like stocks in a commercial process where one is trying to move stuff off and make a return on it. We come at inventory from a very different space. Because of all the work we have been doing on that in recent years, one can see a spike in the inventory for 2015 in the amount of write-offs where we have had obsolete or slow-moving stock. That is an overhead on us.