Professor Tom Collins:

I take the Senator's point on doing siloed work and not sharing well. We do not do it well. There has been an ongoing development in the role of various groups with an environmental protection focus in the past two decades. With regard to water, I reference the development of the local authorities water programme, the IPA, the various inspectorates associated with Irish Water and the various environmental inspectorates associated with organisations such as Teagasc and the world of farming. All of us need to be speaking to each other. We could begin there, without an agenda other than exchanging our world views and taking a shape then on what collaboration and co-operation might look like formally. I am struck by the very low levels of even informal interaction between these many bodies at the moment, however. I would like that to begin with some kind of forum or annual event where these people are brought together and look at the world with the understanding that they are all working through a prism that is an entity of itself. I would like to do that. I refer to the new board of IFI, the composition of which is very interesting.

For instance, there are two former county managers. There is a former assistant secretary at the Department of the Environment and Climate Action. There is a person who came from IMI and another who came from the EPA. We have around the table representatives who were formerly attached to a very wide of bodies, all of which have a legitimate and cognate interests in what we are doing in IFI. I hope to be able to move that resource into a conversation.