Mr. Michael Foley:

I concur with everything the Chairman said about the banner county. Volunteerism is certainly an issue for us in Clarecastle. Looking at our own community development company, as directors, we have been there for almost nine or ten years at this stage. We are a group of well-intentioned conservative men. We do not have our gender balance or inclusivity right and we are not at all reflective of our community in this century. Those are internal issues for us to address but they are important because we certainly will not meet the governance test of the charities regulator's governance code that is coming down the tracks next year, for compliance in 2021. That is going to be an issue for quite a number of community and voluntary organisations.

That leads me nicely to the role of volunteer centres. Volunteer Ireland is the national agency for developing volunteerism. There are over 30 affiliated volunteer centres around the country at this time, the most recent addition is in Waterford and is now progressing from a volunteer information centre to an actual volunteer centre. The primary work of these centres is to build databases of organisations and organisational contacts and also a database of volunteerism, people who have some time on their hands, and to effectively act as an honest broker. It is a tremendous concept and works very well. Centres in different counties have different challenges but, on balance, it is something that works very well.

There is not a huge element of Exchequer funding going in there, although it is increasing. Those centres have tremendous capability within them and provide volunteer management training, volunteer management programmes and advisory services for organisations about how to attract, retain and reward volunteers. Much of it comes down to that.

The volunteer centre in Ennis works closely with the local authority, the Clare local development company that the Chairman mentioned and the public participation network, PPN, and the local community development committee, LCDC, in terms of making itself relevant and building capacities within different community and voluntary organisations. Deputy Fitzmaurice mentioned the whole-of-government approach to what we are trying to do here. There is also a whole-of-Department approach that has to be looked at and there will perhaps be an opportunity at next week's session with the assistant secretary for the committee to broach the subject of how the work of those volunteer centres and their capabilities can be brought to bear in a structured way to support communities in the space that we are talking about here. There are definitely opportunities to build volunteering capacity within organisations in a structured way utilising the capability of volunteer centres. That would be the strong message I would like to leave with the members of the committee this evening.