Ms Edel McGinley:

I will comment on the competent authority, the operational committee and the trusted partner. For this to work, as we have said for years, it needs the involvement of civil society and NGOs. In order for the Department to build trust with organisations like ours and others to come forward to participate in that we need a large degree of clarity around how this will work. There remains a lack of clarity around how the operational committee and competent authority will work. It is not clear in legislation how they all interact with each other. As we move into the next stage, that clarity really needs to be brought to bear. If we do not get this right, we will have wasted time, money and effort. The Department and NGOs are all acting in good faith and we all want this to work but we do need more clarity as we go forward about how all of these things interact. If we do not get that at this stage and move into Second Stage, it will be really difficult in terms of the longer term impacts. We are all in this together and we all want this to happen. We would like to see more clarity on that because we have questions too.