Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I thank the Senator for her questions on the SEC strategy of learn-plan-do. I wish to make a general comment about communities because I have spent quite a period of my career working with communities. They are at different stages and, unfortunately, we use a single homogenous definition of "community". As the Senator will well know from working with groups, some of them are way ahead, some are in the middle and some are not so far ahead, which we see in the SEC group.

She said that anecdotally the learn and plan strands of the strategy work well but the last strand seems to fizzle out. That would be the learning across communities generally and it does not matter what programme or who gets to the finish line. We have considered the matter internally and are concerned. Traditionally, we would have passed the committees on the do phase into the CEG programme and we still do a lot of that, as my colleague has outlined. As much as 100% of the CEG projects last year had an SEC linked into them. We are looking at the do phase. We are trying to understand whether we need to do more within that phase and whether another sub-step is required before they go to the CEG programme. My colleague, Ms Buggie, will comment further.