Mr. Barry Delany:

I am going to first refer back to Deputy Aird's question about whether farmers have to plant back the trees. The agroforestry scheme could be considered as the compromise we ended up with. At least farmers can now put livestock back on land, if they are not minded to go back to full forestry. That is the package.

In terms of what schemes the Department has on the forestry side, we were able to secure a package for planted ash. The vast majority of ash trees in the hedgerows of Ireland are affected in some way or another. As we saw, many of them came down in the various storms recently and farmers had to take action. The Department does not currently have an agreed approach for that. We would have to work really closely with the local authorities, the Department of housing, Transport Infrastructure Ireland and others to work out how we would do that. To be honest, I do not have any solution to that at the moment. If we think of the scale of roadside ash, it is quite enormous in terms of its removal. The liability is with landowner, as we know from various High Court cases. The liability is on the landowner to remove them.