Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

First, I will mention Haulbowline island, which is very specific. We took over Haulbowline a number of years ago to remediate a site there that needed remediation, the former Irish Steel site. It is also the headquarters of the Irish Naval Service. Having remediated the east tip of Haulbowline, there has been a Government decision to transfer it back to the Department of Defence. That is a large site with a very specific purpose and there is no prospect of disposal by the State any time soon. It is the Naval Service headquarters and there is also a public park there.

We have a number of regional laboratories around the country and again, these are places where the Department has buildings and functions. We have a proposal in gestation to redevelop some of those buildings but completing that work will depend on whether we get the required funding. There is a long list of sites in the appendix and a lot of them are small bits of forest and bog. We do not have valuations for them because our policy is to value things at the point of disposal. Some of the sites are former Land Commission sites and some of them are bits of land on top of mountains. We are looking at our forestry plots to see if it is worthwhile transferring them to Coillte. Most of them, I would suggest, have very little value. They are not fit for agriculture.

We have a number of specific sites like the potato testing centre in Raphoe, which is quite near Raphoe town. There is a farm there and a research centre that is going to be more important than ever in the context of seed potatoes. We also have Backweston, our laboratory complex which was developed back in the 1990s. We do not have a valuation on that either but there is no prospect of the State disposing of its interest there. The State Laboratory is there and we have a variety of other laboratories on site. We have some ideas about how that site might be developed as a centre of excellence for laboratories generally across the State. That is it in terms of significant holdings. The vast majority of items on the list are small plots of bog or forestry that are legacies from the Land Commission and are probably of very little value.