Ms Eileen Mannion:

In relation to the European liaison officers on local authorities, they are absolutely critical. In the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, we are a region in transition. I do not think we are getting enough European funding. We have raised this at local authority level. Last year, we increased our local property rates and we increased our commercial rates to try to bring funding into our local authorities so we could get more from central government to bring in more staff. It is really critical that we have more staff to deal with these kinds of funding applications. The European liaison officer role is really critical for us in Galway and in the wider region. I do not know who will fund that, though. Maybe it is something that could be raised with the committee members to try to get local authorities to put that role in place. Maybe for the bigger local authorities, we could have one officer and perhaps the smaller local authorities could share to ensure we can get the funding that is available through Europe.