Mr. John Gallagher:

I work with a broad coalition of all the service delivery organisations that have been dealing with the WRC and with many of the questions the Senator raised. The under-resourcing of the sector traditionally is the biggest issue with its sustainability on an ongoing basis. Wage levels were, on average, 20% below those offered by the HSE, Tusla and other entities. General resourcing of other costs was not taken into account. That is the prime difficulty with sustainability. That said, there is a need for continual reviews of how the sector operates. The question of there being too many organisations is one that has to be up for discussion. I have been around long enough to know that over the years there were various reviews of, say, credit unions. Going back many years, trade unions were brought together in mergers. If we are going to talk about that, there should be a Government-supported initiative to allow due diligence, the merging of organisations, board reconstitution, etc. This will not happen unless that is supported.

The programme for Government refers to getting out of silos and to cross-departmental initiatives. We have a real opportunity to do something in that regard. A big difficulty for the sector is that most organisations receive funding from different sources. Some get funding from all four areas covered in the WRC. They have different requirements and forms to fill out, as well as different deadlines to meet. This places a huge burden on them. Some initiative could be taken there.

As part of the agreement, we will be setting up a data collection process that, over a period of, say, up to a year, will be used to gather information on the type of question the Senator is asking. Hopefully, at the end of that period, recommendations will be brought to the Government on how we make progress in the future.