Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I heard your suggestion about the committee breaking up into smaller working groups and dealing with elements of the task. We should hold off on that. It is a good suggestion, but we will start with the overarching presentation and briefing, then look at how we might proceed. A huge number of groups are certainly very keen to come before the committee. We have to be very careful about that. For individual members to meet with groups and bring feedback to the committee entails those groups having access through members. Maybe after the initial presentation we will have some discussion on that and see whether we can put some shape on how we will proceed. In the meantime, I will ask the secretariat to identify some of the representative groups. There are umpteen patient groups, for example; we cannot have them all in, but there are a small number of umbrella groups that represent several different patient groups. We might just look at suggested groupings that we would invite before the committee. I will come back to members at the next meeting on that, if that is all right.