Mr. J.P. Mulherin:

On delivery across Government, there is a range of strategies that I mentioned in my opening statement such as Our Rural Future, the Sustainable, Inclusive and Empowered Communities strategy, and the national volunteering strategy. There are oversight mechanisms for all of those policies across Government and many of them include external stakeholders as well. There is quite a lot of collaboration across Government on each of these policy measures. We have been cognisant, in developing the actions as part of these policies, of the need to align them with the sustainable development goals in order that when we engage with other Departments on the actions for which they may be responsible, there is a clear link back to the sustainable development goals. There was a question about practical implementation. One small example would be on the Tidy Towns competition. We have engaged quite heavily with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications on how we deliver that competition in a way that recognises the importance of the sustainable development goals and as part of that competition, we linked all of the different themes with the sustainable development goals. Our colleagues in the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications have taken part in webinars that engaged with Tidy Towns groups to explain the SDGs to the Tidy Towns groups and they sponsored one of the awards under the Tidy Towns competition. That is happening right across the different areas we are involved in.

We spoke about the library strategy as part of my opening statement. The SDG week in the libraries involved ourselves, the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA, across local authorities, and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, so there is a range of different organisations coming together to try to make a difference in how the SDGs are delivered. I would say there is quite a lot of collaboration across Government on the delivery of the goals.