Professor Frank O'Mara:

I will let Dr. Lalor come in on the short courses for farmers and I will let Dr. Butler come in on the people aged under 23. I will deal with the general public and educating or raising awareness among them, which is a big challenge for us because the general public are becoming further removed from agriculture. We recognise this as something we have a role to play in. We partner with Agri Aware in its student open days and every year we are involved in Science Week. All of our centres and lots of other parts of the organisation would hold events during Science Week for their local communities. We are involved in the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition and there is huge interest in students submitting agricultural projects to same. We are involved in that and we support a lot of those young scientists with their projects. We work with the Irish Agricultural Science Teachers Association as well because it touches a lot of students. Many schools teach agricultural science as a subject and we try to support the agricultural science teachers in any way we can.

On broader dissemination, we always put out a number of pieces into the "10 Things to Know About..." programme. That is a programme that RTÉ commissions and there are generally six programmes every year on any aspect of science. We would have two or three slots that cover aspects of farming and food production. That gets wide dissemination. Another similar initiative we try to leverage is the RTÉ Brainstorm series where any scientist can write an article, in layman's language, on a particular topic. RTÉ may or may not take the article but if it is a good article it will go up on its news page.

We probably submit eight or ten articles a year and some of them get very good traction. We are involved in all of those things but there is only so much we can do.

Another plank of our strategy is we try to provide information for others that might amplify it, such as the media. We have various publications. Our TResearchmagazine comes out four times a year with bite-size news articles and we sometimes get traction with those with some of the media. Likewise, we always try to get media to amplify the messages of our events, such as our open days, so that it carries out to a wider audience. It is not just the agri-media but also the general media. Communication is an area one cannot do enough in, to be honest, and it is challenging. So much communication is going out to people about various things and it is hard to get meaningful space in that mix. However, we recognise it is important for us to be involved in it.

Does Dr. Lalor wish to deal with the short courses?