Ms Máire Uí Mhaoláin:

It is important to have this in the report. The biggest threat to sustainable rural regional development is the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. There has been much talk about joined-up thinking but there is no joined-up thinking here. There is a Leader section, a Gaeltacht section and various other sections and they are not talking to each other. We find that civil servants do not know each other and do not know what are each other's aims. That is the biggest threat to all this. If the committee waits a few weeks to do anything about the issues relating to Leader, it will be too late. We will have lost many of our staff, the committee will probably have lost many of its staff and nothing will be resolved. We need to get this Department right. My final remark is that we need to join up the thinking.