Mr. Mark Carlin:

On Deputy Healy-Rae’s point about presence on the ground, it is a point that is well made. It is something we are reflecting on as well. He mentioned the word “community”. That is what we need to get back to in forestry. There has been a degree of centralisation of foresters, moving to central offices, perhaps a generation ago or ten years ago, when they had to, but as we have seen through Covid, new technology allows people to work much more easily in the field. That is something we want to make sure we do, to disperse our forestry and ensure we get them back in the community. That is a model we want to go forward with. We hire locally as well, to work locally. That is a very important part of the plan, going forward. I hope that will correct some of the things the Deputy is perhaps seeing and make sure we have a presence on the ground.

From the point of view of hiring foresters, we are hiring foresters. We hire foresters regularly. We also have a graduate programme, where we bring in graduates every year. There are two ways of hiring. We either hire directly or we bring in graduates and we develop them ourselves. That is a model that we will continue.