Mr. Paul Kelly:

I thank the Deputy for his kind words. It was a great pleasure to work with him during those years and I thank him for all of his support during that time. His passion, enthusiasm, energy and insight were valued and I thank him for that.

On the outdoors, that is a central part of our strategy in terms of development because it will be important not just during Covid-19 but post Covid-19. We have to define the outdoors as both urban and rural and we have to define both daytime and night-time. We are looking at all of those aspects. Just yesterday, we engaged with a number of local authorities, including Kerry County Council, on a proposal that we will announce in more detail after Christmas around the building of facilities for shared activity use to access the water in beach locations and so on. We are working through all of our destination towns, which the Deputy launched with us in Tralee last year. There are a bunch of public realm improvements that will facilitate improved enjoyment of the outdoors in urban areas in terms of public seating, signage and general public realm improvements. The research completely backs up the view that this is what people want and that is coming through from the Irish and international research. That is a big part of what we will be doing.

We are acutely aware of the cash flow pressures businesses are under and we are moving as fast as we possibly can on the processing of grants. Unfortunately for the adaptation grants scheme, the applications came through late and we had to extend the deadline. We then got thousands of applicants in the last two days, which slows everything down. We are working through them as fast as we can and we will continue to do that.