Mr. Maurice Quinn:

At a senior level, going back four or five years, we have put a huge amount of work into our inventory management for a number of reasons. We have the biggest inventory stockholding in the public service. When one thinks about what it is - weapons, ammunition as well as a lot of military equipment - the priority for us all along always was that I could be assured that we had systems in place where we knew where everything was, how much we had and that we minded it properly. However, going back four or five years, we started focusing very seriously on driving out inefficiencies from within our inventory. We tried to prioritise funding into our equipment replacement programmes and so forth to fully equip the Defence Forces. We got an external review done of our systems around inventory management and stock control. That is why one can see a gradual reduction in inventory levels. We also had some recoding to do when our management information system was implemented in 2005. We have done a huge amount of work on that and it is reflected in the gradual reduction.