Mr. Senan Cooke:

I want to make two points. One is that Dunhill completed two Interreg projects recently. One of them was Interreg Action, which was on social enterprise. It was to identify, develop and promote social enterprise. We found that there were 218 social enterprises in County Waterford and we suspect there are approximately 300. All of them are central to rural communities, to urban communities and especially to isolated communities. The main recommendation from it was that we develop a south east social enterprise brokerage and that we could do the same in every county in the south east, which would amount to over 1,000 or maybe 2,000. We believe that when people would see the result of the audit they would suddenly realise that these were crucial to maintaining the social and economic fabric of communities.

The second recommendation concerned Interreg HERCULES, which was about tourism's sense of place.

The main recommendation that came from that was that we could, through collaboration, set up a 12-month tourism season in County Waterford and the rest of the south east. It was clear that if we could do it, additional jobs could be created. If we acted on this immediately, jobs could be created. Even if only a small number of jobs were created, it would be a signal that jobs would be created from the bottom up. It would mean so much to the people involved and their communities.