Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

As part of the winter resilience plan the Government requested we put in place, we are bringing in additional emergency resources for timber-cutting in the circuits that have been most affected by Storm Éowyn. We are also bringing in resources to do targeted forestry corridor work. As the Senator knows, forestry was a significant issue, particularly in counties Galway, Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo and other counties. We are also talking to Government about its plans to potentially bring in legislation relating to this for the future.

To talk about our ongoing programme relating to timber and trees that are in close proximity to overhead lines, we have been growing our external resource in this area. At this stage, we have about 400 people working full-time nationally on timber-cutting. We are looking to increase that number in the next price review period, hopefully getting up to around 500 people into next year. The funding associated with that was part of our submission before Storm Éowyn, when we published our business plan back in November. Ultimately, the decision around that rests with our regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU. We are expecting draft information on that this week and, ultimately, a final determination which will decide our funding for the next five years. We are very conscious of all our customers, particularly those in the west, who suffered severely, not only in this recent storm but in previous ones too. We are hoping to get investment to support reliability for the network in that area.