Mr. Eoghan Duffy:

The shared island fund project is, as the Senator said, for €7.6 million and is being taken forward by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. There is a project team which involves the three tourism agencies and is chaired by that Department. That is a three-year plan and probably beyond. The kinds of things that it is going to involve will be looking at ways to align and have the signage on the Wild Atlantic Way in the region and on the Causeway Coastal Route referring to each other, so there is more consistency and linkages between them and they are not literally pointing in different directions. There is also the international marketing of the whole region, bringing the two together rather than having them separate, and also, at the sectoral operational level, looking at cross-promotional content online and online booking facilities, so people are getting offers for the whole region rather than on a segmented basis.

These are the kinds of things that the agencies are going to work on. What the shared island funding does is it allows them to do this work on an integrated basis. They have their funding to do these things separately but this is funding specifically for them to do it on a collaborative basis, and that is why we get the kind of output we would not otherwise get. That is starting now and will be moving forward over the next number of years.

On the local authorities scheme, we have had a number of really good engagements with councils at political level across the North and we would be keen to keep doing that, particularly after the elections in the next few weeks. That has been very helpful for us in terms of hearing what councillors’ and councils’ interests are on the shared island and how this is understood, and also communicating it at a community level to say that there are these different schemes. The councillors are very well placed to make those connections for our Departments and for the schemes directly, so we are keen to do that.

On the media dialogue, first, there is a report and a video summary of the discussions on Monday, which were really thought-provoking, both in general terms and also in regard to sectoral issues. Second, as was discussed on Monday, the Media Commission is due to conduct research on media in cross-Border terms, so it will certainly feed into that, we hope. There were a number of ideas and suggestions so we will bring those through in the report and see how they can be taken forward. That is the plan for that.