Ms Emma Murtagh:

Absolutely. We have been doing that over the last three years. We have been running a series of roadshows around the country and we have been in Cork, Mayo, Sligo, Donegal, Leitrim and Longford and we are in Roscommon soon. Where they are open to it, we work with the local authorities to bring them in to talk about the type of funding that they have available for the community and voluntary sector. We also talked about Access Europe and did a kind of overview of some of the European funding programmes that are available.

What really makes a difference, and what the Senator has been campaigning for, is to have a European person. It sometimes feels like we are not getting much traction or interest without that. We have worked very closely with the European programme support office in Dublin City Council to do a series of training sessions for its staff around how to manage these programmes. We would love to be able to do that with all of the different local authorities. We have collaborated with Donegal and other great county councils with regard to drawing down EU funding and I spoke at their conference and did other bits of training and things like that.