Mr. Mark Carlin:

We wind forward then into 2021. What we wanted to do in the early conversations with ISIF, and then with Gresham House, was to explore how would you set up a fund, what the fund and the investors would look like, what the scale would be, what role Coillte would play and what role would there be for cornerstone investors. We were trying to work through all of this in 2021. In 2022, we were starting to get into the details of what this could be in terms of the construct.

All along, in 2021 and 2022, there was ongoing engagement between Coillte and the Department because the Department was asking us what were we doing about afforestation. We have already spoken about 2019 and state aid. In the meantime, we needed to work on other initiatives, such as Bord na Móna, public lands and this one. We would have been in regular communications about an afforestation fund. Nature Trust was the other fund that we had in play at that stage. We would have been in ongoing discussions with it on all of that. Then, in 2022, when we were starting to finalise the fund in terms of its construction, we would have continued those conversations right up to the point where we had it finalised on 15 December. There would have been ongoing discussions all the way through for the last couple of years.