Mr. Johnny Sheehan:

I work with The Wheel and I am part of Coalition 2030. With regard to local authorities, and more broadly the role at local level, we have local authorities, community organisations and community development programmes. The mission of all of them is to deliver on one or more of the SDGs. This is important to note. Ms Lennon mentioned the Department of Rural and Community Development's Our Rural Future strategy. There is also the Sustainable, Inclusive and Empowered Communities five-year strategy for the community and voluntary sector. It mentions strengthening and building understanding and capacity to support the implementation of the national implementation plan for the SDGs. It makes a number of commitments, including developing programmes to implement and raise awareness of the goals among local community development committees, local authorities and Departments. It discusses supporting capacity for the goals at local level and providing supports, including funding, to all sectors to implement them.

It is not clear how much progress is involved. For example, organisations are asked to map what they do with regard to the sustainable development goals but it does not go further than this. They map it but that is it. They now know about the SDGs and the job is done. More needs to be done. Perhaps there is a role for the committee to examine to what end this is being done. To what extent is awareness being raised? More than this, are we working with community and voluntary organisations and local authorities to implement the goals?

There are a number of commitments in the policy map that Ms Carmody mentioned. For example, Goal 17 deals with partnerships and collaboration and working with community organisations. Yesterday, I met an organisation involved in recycling and upcycling. It does up old bicycles and provides them to the DEIS schools and migrant groups. It is about ensuring that all of these groups are supported and through their work we achieving the SDGs. There needs to be adequate resourcing for these community groups.

Local authorities have public participation networks in every local authority area in the country. These are networks of local community and voluntary organisations, environmental organisations and organisations working on social inclusion that directly address the delivery of the goals. The role of the public participation networks needs to be adequately resourced and supported to implement the goals at local level.

The Department of Rural and Community Development has guidance on the values and principles for partnership and collaboration with the community and voluntary sector. It is great this is being done but producing guidance is not enough. It needs to be brought to local authorities and everyone else with regard to delivery so it will be used to improve the way in which this operates.

We saw in the Covid crisis the realisation that we need a partnership and collaboration approach between the State and local groups throughout the country and we see now in Ukraine crisis that we need it to support Ukrainian refugees and international protection applicants adequately throughout the country and counter negative publicity and media. It is very important that we recognise what has been done and, equally, identify to what end it is being done.