Ms Catherine McGuigan:

The presentation referred just to the 21 local authorities which participated in the healthy and positive ageing initiative. That is not indicative of the landscape of the Age Friendly programme. The programme is in all 31 local authority areas. The first one to take it on was Louth County Council, shortly followed by Meath, Fingal, Cavan, Monaghan and Kilkenny. Then, gradually, every other county council came on board. Obviously, the Age Friendly programme has the resources to be able to help facilitate its roll-out.

One of the core principles behind it is that, oftentimes, there are many good elements working although they are inconsistent and patchy. It might be working well in Mayo or Carlow but we need to learn from that. The Age Friendly programme intended not to lobby or be combative but to ask older people to co-design solutions with us in order we could bring them to the senior stakeholders. Accordingly, an older person's council was established in every local authority area along with a strategic alliance. The strategic alliance, chaired by the chief executive of the local authority, involves a Garda chief superintendent, as well as senior personnel from the HSE, the education and training boards, NGOs, the private and public sectors and academia to collectively look at older people's priorities at local level. At a national level, we are trying to give scale to the issues older people are raising and also ensure they are representative. Older people are not a homogenous group. Not all 70 year olds are able to walk 5 km or whatever the case may be. Some have chronic conditions, dementia or suffer from rural isolation while others are active. There are affluent older people and others in poverty. We have tried to collectively get what the key issues are.

We bring together and meet the chief executive officers of the NGOs every three months to ensure we are sharing our different learnings and what we are doing. There are 12 to 14 members across this who we meet every three months. At national level, our oversight group has four departmental assistant secretaries, chief executives, a Garda assistant commissioner, the head of Chambers Ireland and a director from the HSE. We are feeding up with the national issues. We want to ensure those issues are representative.

We did not want to create pots of funding to do age-friendly things. We wanted pots of funding to deliver services in an age-friendly way. It is more about being creative with the budgets we already have, particularly in the context of housing. For example, Carlow is one of the best counties for age-friendly parking. Carlow County Council has designed the template which we can share with other local authorities. It is like the mother and baby parking notice and is easily identifiable as a parking facility for those who may not qualify for a disability badge.

Many initiatives have been rolled out. Some we have helped deliver directly. Others we have put structure around. In all projects, we try to scale up, replicate what works, share best practice and ensure there is consistency around the country. We are also scaling up on what are the national priority issues which we are getting from the grassroots. I agree with the Senator that, in principle, we need to have more resources at local level to ensure we can continue to provide local delivery.