Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

I am sorry that I missed the very start of the meeting but I had read the presentations beforehand. I thank the witnesses for being here and for their work. I have a question about how things happen. There are lots of Departments and agencies involved here, including the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, Sport Ireland, the Department of tourism and the Department of education to a certain extent. There is an expression that holds that when everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible. I ask the witnesses to explain how it works. Sometimes there might be an offering on the tourism end and people might be working away on that but there could be something else on the sport end and maybe they should be talking to each other but they are not. If we take the development of greenways, for example, some are developed for tourism while others are developed for active travel and for linking up areas. In my own area, there was an attempt at one stage to build two cycle lanes that would basically run side by side because the tourism people were not talking to others and the right people were not all in the room together. I ask our guests to describe how all of the parties come together and who is the main driver. Does the Department get good buy-in from the other Departments involved?