Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

There is no doubt but that there are significant challenges with recruitment, the retention of skills and growing the skills base that will be needed for the climate transition. I mentioned in my opening statement that we have approximately 3,400 employees. We have approximately 1,400 network technicians who are out working on the network every day. We are planning to bring in approximately 90 in total this year into that group alone. We could be recruiting somewhere in the region of 300 to 400 because we will have a retirement profile as well in the next couple of years. We have a very active apprenticeship programme, which is crucial for us. This year we have the highest number of first-year apprentices we have had, which is evident if we look back over the past four to five years. We have 96 first-year apprentices. I often call them the lifeblood of the company coming in at that level, but there are many other areas as well where we actively looking to recruit at the moment, including specialist engineers for network planning, for example, project managers and many others. This is a very important time to grow the staff, but also our contractor base is another key area. We had a contractor conference in June, where we met our contractors to talk to them about scaling up the delivery for the years ahead. It is in order that when we are preparing projects at distribution level and jointly with EirGrid for transmission, we have the contractor base externally to both organisations but also our own internal resources. It is a critical area. It is a massive opportunity for the country in terms of employment and the skills base.