Mr. Gavan Woods:

I will say a few words. We were asked to do that. Not speaking necessarily for the secretariat of Dublin city but just reflecting on what I have heard, in broad terms the funding of local government and the participation by citizens where they live and work is an important thing, and if a directly-elected mayor could facilitate and encourage that it would be helpful. I was struck by what the first gentleman said about county and area boundaries and lines being helpful from the administrative perspective but not really reflective of how people engage and live in the city and that it is really an entity and perhaps a single individual being responsible for that wider entity and being focused on that and able to make decisions might be helpful. These ideas of barriers and separations of the city are not reflective of people's lived experience in the city, how they engage with it and live in the city. Those are my few comments.