Mr. John McCarthy:

We are just coming now to the first anniversary of the new arrangements coming in since the town councils were merged with their counties. The Minister has said that first anniversary provides an opportune time to see how those new arrangements have worked out in the first 12 months, acknowledging at the same time that the significance of the changes that were introduced are likely to take longer than 12 months to really come to fruition. He has established a group to look at this, working with selective representatives to start to get a sense of the extent to which particularly the new municipal districts in place of town councils are working out in practice.