Mr. Bill Stanley:

The letter that went out was a very simple one. It was appended to one of the interim reports we sent to this committee. It highlighted that issues were drawn to our attention, that we understood some frustration was expressed by our partners and, in particular, frustration was expressed that when they have questions they do not know to where to turn. In response to that, we have set up this call line. The call line is manned full time by a full-time member of Coillte's staff. It is not manned by a call centre off-site. The first role of the person who answers a call is to assign it as an issue to somebody within the farm partnership team. That may be somebody locally or centrally depending on the nature of the query, whether it is primarily a commercial or an operational query.

Our experience of that call line, and the response to it, has been that the vast majority of calls are requests for information. It has become very clear to us through our engagement with our partners that we have not lived up to the standards we would expect of ourselves in terms of communicating. We have mentioned that and that we are taking very clear steps in that regard.