Mr. Teddy Cashman:

It comes down to local deer management units, which would set targets in their own areas. It is about co-ordination and collaboration. Let us say an area of 10 square miles is a local unit. You bring in a number of hunters as your dedicated hunters for that area. You bring in the farmers and, let us say, foresters are involved. Everybody meets and there is collaboration. You get a general view as to what the major impacts in that area are and what they see. From the start, we will need funding to figure out what success is and what impacts to look at.

I will give an example that I have given a number of times to give a slight flavour of how that might work. We were in Baronscourt Estate – Lord Hamilton’s place – during the summer to get a feel for where measurement was being done and for how this works. On that estate, there are about 2,000 ha – I cannot remember the exact size. They have been trying to count deer there for a number of years and have been doing it to some success, but the accuracy is plus or minus 30%. That is as good as we will get. They reckon they have about 750 deer and they are shooting 250 of those every year. They figure they have a density of about 21 deer per square kilometre on that estate. They are also doing impact assessments on 25 sites across the whole area they have from the point of view of biodiversity and regeneration. At 21 deer per square kilometre, the deer are still impacting very adversely on the biodiversity. They feel they need to get down to 10 deer per square kilometre, which is the level that Scotland believes is needed for the regeneration and forestry. It is clear that in many parts of Ireland, particularly in parts of Wicklow, there could be in excess of 40 deer per square kilometre. This figure is anecdotal, so I will not say it is perfect.