Ms Aoife Bairéad:

I will add one thing to what the Chairman said. One of the difficulties he mentioned earlier was that because we have such short-term funding and the way funding is done, it is really hard to recruit and retain staff, particularly if people move into, say, the HSE and other places where they will get pensions and permanency and all of that. Because so many of our services are literally in survival mode, the time and energy it would take to share the information we have and give it to Government so that it would know is not always there. Often, when things come up or when new funding comes up, we are scrambling to try to get as many people as possible together to get that funding into place and again, because it is done in short-term small pots here and there, even just that process takes an extraordinary amount of time. Therefore, not having the staff we need means that we cannot collate the information we know we have. Certainly, it is much harder to co-ordinate that nationally. We have the chairpersons' network. They are volunteers; we are all volunteers. Most of us do our very best to do that. However, those things have such huge consequences because we cannot retain and recruit the staff we need to work and function the way we need to. That is such an important part of this moving forward.