Mr. Seán Moynihan:

We are part of an alliance which comprises Age Action, Age and Opportunity, Third Age, the Hospice Foundation and the Senior Citizens Parliament. The chief executive officers of these organisations will meet once a month. We put in common Government and pre-budget submissions. We are sending one simple message on various policies to all the different political parties. We work with the Department of Health on the national positive ageing strategy.

A subset of that encompassing four or five CEOs is meeting all the designated officers in each Department, be it transport or health, in connection with older people and trying to get some traction for the implementation of the national positive ageing strategy on the basis that a whole-of-Government approach is difficult to operate from one Department but, as NGOs, we can go between the different Departments because we do not have those statutory boundaries. As an organisation, we have long realised that no one NGO can meet the needs of all populations. While we have scaled, and plan to scale further on what we do, we also have a coalition of approximately 54 smaller community groups up and down the country where we provide technology, resources and training to other agencies. Since the Senator is being local about it, that includes Kilkenny and Carlow Contact. Ultimately, Kilkenny and Carlow Contact falls within our remit. This promotes common practice and quality standards. Ten organisations are on the one management information system we provide so the work done in Carlow will be the same as that done in Kilkenny, Donegal, Louth and Dublin and when people go into an acute hospital or look for services, we have information on what we are doing.

There is much to be done and much that we are trying to do to bring our sector together to demonstrate our responsibilities to work collectively in arenas such as this. The challenge for us is always that there are so many of us in terms of what we are all doing. There is a very significant amount of partnership and we are moving beyond partnership to how we align and coalesce strategically. There is enough work for everybody but we also need to work with the political system to bring about the changes in the type of grants schemes and the types of housing we build so that these coalitions and this co-operation actually come to fruition.