Mr. Ian Talbot:

I draw attention to the Jim Breslin group on local democracy, for example, which is going on at the moment. We fed into that. Some of our big concerns have been around how municipal districts, for example, are being run and how in some places there are municipal districts and in others, you have area committees. There does not seem to be any consistency. One of the things we have proposed in that group is that we get some sort of consistency and cross-learning from municipal districts that are operating well, for example, to try to fill that space people feel the lack of a town council has created.

On the chambers across the country, it is hard for me to pick out one chamber chief executive and say they are doing a great job. All of our chief executives are doing a great job. Ms Ronan has really hit the ground running; I was just talking to her yesterday. It is the nature of how our business community is spread out as well. This is why I go back to the earlier point with Deputy McCormack. We have been trying to get more chambers that look like Galway. Galway is obviously one of our cities in the NDP, etc., and it has got an advantage. However, we are looking at areas like, for example, Sligo. There is a county chamber in Sligo and it does a good job. Then you go into Mayo and we have five or six chambers. They talk to each other on some stuff. On other things, the Deputy will be familiar with Ballina, which won our chamber of the year two years ago. It did fantastic work around the Biden visit but in the intervening period, the chief executive left and it is a real challenge for a local board of volunteers to say how it would fill the boots of somebody doing a great job. That is a challenge and it goes back to the fact that there is not a huge number of companies in some of those towns to provide not just the funding but also that volunteer element to make things happen.

It is a challenge for us and increasingly, we want to see chambers working together, co-operating, taking some of our core messages and delivering them locally. However, you need some sort of critical mass. You need somebody looking at the stuff coming in and turning it over, making it into a local message. That is really important for us as a network and we all understand that.