Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

There are three categories of land here. There is land that the Department uses. There is forestry land that was transferred to Coillte in 1989 but elements of the transfer involved difficult issues of ownership and legal issues. That was not transferred. The third category is this Land Commission legacy land. Our policy was to value lands if they were being disposed of. There were quite a lot of small plots of bog with turbary rights and other complexities. We have now moved to value the lands we have. We have started with Backweston, which is being valued this week. We are working with Tailte Éireann to value the farm in Raphoe. We are also working with Táilte Éireann to come up with a basis for the valuation of those other lands, which will involve some kind of a desktop review. We are working to transfer the remaining forestry lands to Coillte, but some of that is complicated stuff. Our objective is to transfer those boglands to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS. Again, there are complicated issues. These are essentially legacy plots that we have had for decades and were not using. These are difficult enough issues to resolve.

We have resolved the duplication of registration with the Office of Public Works, OPW. In respect of the houses on those farms, two of the farms are involved in legacy issues. Two of those houses were resided in by farm managers. We run farms and have farm managers who live in the houses. Their contracts of employment require them to live on the farm.