Mr. Fergal Leamy:

I will respond to some of those queries, and my colleague will answer a couple more. In answer to the Deputy's query on afforestation, 70 ha of that 6,000 will come from Coillte this year. We have been more or less out of the afforestation game over the last ten or 15 years because we do not get a grant or premium to plant afforestation, so every time we plant a new hectare of land, it is not commercially viable for us to do that. Having said that, I refer to my earlier comment. We want to do more and are working with the Department to try to take away some of the barriers in order to allow us to do more and to make us, as the largest forest player in the industry, a vehicle driving afforestation in this country. It is something that I am personally involved in and helping to alleviate, because I think we should be doing more.

In respect of the non-productive areas, there are certainly parts of that 100,000 ha that I quoted which can be used for other biodiversity projects and carbon capture. We are not precious about who manages that. Our commercial mandate would suggest, as the Deputy quite rightly pointed out, that it is not viable to do that from a very narrow focus of commercial return.

However, if one looks at greater carbon sequestration and the value of that to the State, one may come up with a slightly different conclusion. That is why we need to look at those pockets of land in a different way.