Councillor John Sheehan:

The seed of it is the fact that we take a national strategy. With all due respect to our Oireachtas Members present, everything comes from the Oireachtas down to us. We want to see that done on a regional basis and not on a sectoral basis as is done currently. To take agriculture, we take a one size fits all approach in that sector but micro-management and macro-management is part of that. People are being left behind because we get a European directive and seem to couch it into just one movement. When it gets back down to the people at grassroots level, they feel it is being imposed on them rather than Europe working with them. We want to do it the other way around on a regional basis to ensure we can have an input into the policy in terms of the variations at the micro level. We can then push it upstream, so to speak, to the national Parliament, and it will then come back to us in terms of the Europe 2020 strategy.