Mr. Simon White:

Deputy Fitzmaurice has asked a lot of questions. I will try to go through some of them and I will take the last one first. Our members comprise many types of people. There are people with small plantations, big plantations, young plantations and old plantations. Each one is different. Our problem is that we do not have access to the official data but it is all there in the Department's section on forestry. It has access to all of this. If it co-operated with us we could come up with solutions with it. We have to have access to these data also. For years, the Department did not even share these data with the likes of Teagasc. The advisory body that should have been advising people was not able to do so. It was isolated.

Deputy Fitzmaurice asked what type of scheme we want. We need a new scheme dedicated to dealing with the ash dieback problem. The RUS is a reconstitution and underplanting scheme. Underplanting is not in action now; it is gone. The name of the scheme does not even mean anything. We need a dedicated scheme. We need money put aside to deal with it. We need actions to deal with it. We need machinery. We have lost a great deal of capacity. I find it fascinating that when we were last before the committee, we were speaking about 12,000 jobs in forestry. Now the Minister is speaking about 8,000 jobs in forestry. Where did those 4,000 jobs go? We know. Contractors are not there and forestry workers are not there. There is no capacity. The machines are gone. Even to do the job that needs to be done we will have to have investment in machinery and in personnel to do it on the ground.