Ms Suzanne Keatinge:

I will very briefly respond to Deputy O'Sullivan's question about the sustainable development goals, SDGs, and if I am confident in their oversight. We are members of Coalition 2030, which is a civil society network of domestic agencies, the environmental pillar, trade unions and international non-governmental organisations, NGOs. We can say as part of the coalition that we know Departments are engaging on the SDGs and there is much talk about them. We also know the Central Statistics Office, CSO, has a team examining data. Are we confident there is enough oversight or it is ambitious enough?

I have two concerns. If this is just about data gathering for whether Ireland is on track, we are really missing the ambition of the SDGs and we must go much further by not only seeing if we are on track in Ireland, but asking whether we are playing a role in influencing Europe and really pushing leadership around the SDGs in our partner countries. I do not see that happening yet and the data is not being gathered. I would really like to see it.

I will also admit that we have often put on the table the need for a stakeholder forum to journey throughout the process. The truth is we are two years in now and only this week was the first meeting of the senior officials at a cross-departmental meeting. Is this the urgency we need? This is two years on. The voluntary national review will be in July next year but in other countries, this has been an 18-month participatory process. We do not yet know what the Government is thinking. We need to do much more and there needs to be much more urgency around this issue. There seems to be renewed talk about it and we are confident that this week we will hear more and the coalition will certainly be involved with some of those discussions. This must be a multi-sector forum and it must involve politicians, the private sector, civil society and many other key stakeholders.