Ms Úna Ní Chuinn:

On the PPN specifically, we have to say we are very lucky. We have come through years where the relationships may not have been as good as they are now. We have a very good worker and this goes back to what the Department has said about how it does matter who is in those jobs and the relationships they develop. We have a very active PPN which is well-supported, which is very involved and which delivers. We have also made it a criterion of funding that we deliver to the local authority that one must be a member of a PPN in order to access funding to try to link up what we are trying to do with what they are doing and we are lucky that this has worked very well for us. Members might not have gathered from what we have said so far, but we get on very well in Roscommon with everybody, even the LEADER company. As for the PPNs, the relationships matter - we all know that - in all of our work.

On the point of the town regeneration officers, TROs, and the experience of the TROs, I will follow on from what the Department said. The national office has been significant in supporting the TROs and in guiding the work, as well as in establishing the network of TROs working together that is now in existence. As was said, there is a TRO officer in Waterford who is very experienced. When one is new to the job and have that kind of experience to bounce off, it is really good. We are well resourced in Roscommon and as Mr. Tiernan mentioned earlier, we have a regeneration team. We have engineers, technicians and people who can analyse a project and run with it. They can run with contracts, do procurement and put something in place on the ground. Lots of TROs do not have that because of the make-up of the local authority. That resource needs to be in place to get those projects running because otherwise they are dependent on colleagues in other departments who are busy doing other jobs, to do that job.

As for the health checks, we have done health checks in a number of towns. Carrick-on-Shannon for example has used students from Belfast. They have put them up overnight. It is really cheap but they have done a health check that has mattered to their community. We are following suit in trying to do that.

The last point I wanted to make is on a point made earlier about the architectural conservation officer. That is a key role that our local authority needs to fill because we are now in the process of using consultants to deliver services to us that we, had we the expertise in-house, could do ourselves and probably do really well. In the case of local authorities like Donegal, the work it has done in Ramelton has borne great fruit because it has a conservation architect. There is great excitement about that. If we could make that happen, then we have rounded the circle again in relation to the heritage and the streetscapes and being cognisant of what is important in a town. Those are some points that might be useful.