Ms Suzanne Campion:

There is a real willingness within IFI to work with anglers. We have five officers who work and engage with them fully. We track all the hours spent trying to engage with anglers. At this stage, 60% of our €2.9 million is delivered, which means there are many angling groups delivering projects. We have reviewed the success of the projects in terms of the officers going out to do that.

The issue for many of the clubs is that previously they would give money to IFI and then we would do the work for them. They thought they were doing fantastic work themselves because they were handing over the money, and it was really useful. IFI previously had more staff and could deploy them to do the work. We no longer have the staff. By the same token, we can no longer just jump into a river and do work because we get a lot of criticism in terms of security. We have to get the environmental governance right. There are screenings, assessments and so on that have to be carried out in order to facilitate in-stream projects and while we want to be doing many of them, they take a long time. We have tried to empower stakeholders to do that for themselves and many of them are a little taken aback by that in terms of asking, "What will we do?". In order to do that, we have put a panel of experts in place that anglers can access. We will fund them to access those experts and guide them on what they need and how they can tender for them. We are almost bending over backwards for them but they are up against the barrier of governance and the tradition that used to exist when we had many staff on the ground and could jump in and do the work. I refer to the habitats directive, Natura 2000. We cannot go into a river and cause flooding or biodiversity degradation. We understand that. We have held workshops in many areas. We have developed an environmental assessment process. Everything is available online. We have made videos to explain the position. We have our project officers providing training to our staff and stakeholders. Our staff are going out-----