Mr. Conor Newman:

We are currently operating under a budget of just under €7 million. The funding comes in three tranches, one of which is the Vote. Some €1.5 million comes from the environment fund, but this year that was less than €1 million. We also get some money from the National Parks and Wildlife Service in respect of the operations of the national biodiversity data centre in Waterford. Our funding situation is critical. As I mentioned, we had to cancel our grants programme for this year, but we cannot sustain that. Our priority for 2013 was to try to preserve the infrastructure we had put in place, such as the national biodiversity data centre discovery programme and so on. If we lose those, we will not see them back in our lifetime. Also, there are 70 jobs directly associated with that. It is much more difficult to calculate the number of jobs that are influenced or affected by our grants programme. We felt the grants programme could probably, just about, withstand one year of cancellation, but not two. Otherwise, we begin to lose people's confidence and momentum. We cannot afford for that to happen into the future.

With regard to local authority heritage officers, we have a tug of war of love between the county councils and ourselves because we pay part of the salary of the heritage officers, on a sliding scale. When a county council takes on a heritage officer, we pay the bulk of the salary, but as the years pass, the ratio changes and eventually they become funded 75% by the county council or local authority and 25% by the Heritage Council. Most heritage officers have been in place for a number of years now and they are well embedded and regarded by the county managers. Any of the county managers I have met over the years have nothing but praise for their heritage officers and the work they do. They are a very committed bunch of people and have an interesting range of qualifications, everything from archaeology to botany. There is also an anthropologist among them. They work well as a group and we are very careful to ensure they have ongoing training at the Heritage Council and that they get together regularly so they can exchange ideas. I think the future is very bright for the heritage officers. We are deeply committed to that programme and would like to grow the portfolio if we could.