Ms Sinéad Ward:

The legislation is very new. It has only come into effect this year. It was published in May or June. Obviously, given that it is from the EU, it is quite a sizeable piece of legislation. From reading through it and watching the space about cross-border governance, which is my area of responsibility in the organisation, it seeks to address, at an EU level, the need to deal with the inequalities that arise in border regions. It also recognises that although legislation is being mapped from the EU into each country through national frameworks, in national legislation and so on, it is just plonked in there. The problem is that it might not be mapped or implemented in the same way in neighbouring countries. The relevant authorities discovered that and feel that the cohesion element of the EU should address those border regions.

The legislation asks national governments to create a point of co-ordination, whether through an existing entity or a new statutory body, to allow citizens, NGOs, groups that work at community level and in cross-border situations and even state bodies to address the problems that they might in the context of delivering cross-border public services. The way the legislation is designed means there is a time limit. It cannot just sit there for years and you do not get an answer back. There is an eight-month limit whereby the entity involved would either have to pay for the relevant legal expertise or go to other government Departments to seek the solution to their problem. The latter would go back to the entity to assist it with implementing that solution.