Mr. Tom Donnellan:

We have been aggressively developing indigenous biomass over the years. Private forestry, sawmills and Coillte are our three main sources. We have been aggressively trying to ramp that up. When we started co-firing biomass in Edenderry a number of years, we could only source between 40,000 and 50,000 tonnes so at that stage, the majority of it was imported. We have increased that to approximately 400,000 tonnes this year. We think we are at a limit. We have hoovered up the easy stuff, if I could use that term, and now it will be more challenging. There needs to be serious planting and land use change to do that but we have some ideas and plans for that.

Funding for the transition is an important question. It is being borne by Bord na Móna and, therefore, the restructuring cost in our plan comes out of our resources. That is manageable. We are looking for all sources of funding because if we got other sources of funding to help decarbonise, we could do so more quickly and accelerate our jobs programme more quickly. That is something we will discuss with all parties at Government and EU level to see how we could secure more assistance in-----