Ms Helena Keleher:

My name is Helena Keleher and I work in the conflict resolution unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The Department also has roles under the national action plan or NAP including, for example, on Northern Ireland co-operation and the overseas development aid programme. I am wearing a different hat today, however. The conflict resolution unit is also the secretariat to the monitoring group. We are leading the drafting of the second national action plan.

I wish to pick up on Senator Zappone's point about the difference between providing services and having access to them. Best practice so far has been to consider the NAP as a living document. Therefore, if there are actions in it that are phrased in a way that is impossible to implement, they should be revised. We have revised some of the actions as a result of the mid-term progress report.

Ms Mbugua mentioned interdepartmental co-operation. In that context, another suggestion in that report was to bring in other statutory actors that had not been involved in drafting the first NAP. We are about to start the process of the second national action plan and a representative of the HSE's social inclusion unit will be sitting on the consultative group for that plan. That unit works in a lot of the areas that were raised in the discussion. We hope that aspect will be better drafted and reflected in the second national action plan.