Mr. J.P. Mulherin:

Our role is to try to bring all these groups together to ensure that information does flow between them and to identify areas where funding should be best delivered. In designing the LEADER programme, significant effort was put into identifying the key areas where funding should be delivered. Workshops were hosted with all the groups to identify the types of area where they might want to concentrate their expenditure. As it is community-led local development, ultimately there has to be a bottom-up approach. We try to put the structures in place to ensure that the groups that are delivering programmes and the ones that are applying for projects under the programmes have access to the best information about what they can deliver under the programme.