Mr. Mark Carlin:

This is very important for us all in terms of ash and what happens next. Clearly we have a challenge on our own estate. Probably 3% or 4% of our trees are ash, and we have had to carry out sanitation and further mitigation as well. We have also been working with Teagasc and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on identifying ash dieback-resistant provenances. We have 200 clones that are planted out. It is looking promising at the moment. We planted them deliberately in areas of high infection. Some of those are from Europe. Some are Irish, from Donaghadee, Curragh Chase and Fermanagh. We have identified trees that look resistant. We need to continue monitoring that. The next step will be to create seed orchards from those clones, to harvest the seed, and to start propagating those to get ash back into our forests. However, we need to step through those processes first. We are unfortunately still some years away from that, but we are working as quickly as we can to identify hardy provenances.