Mr. Rodd Bond:

We are trying to look at collaboration in a range of different layers and levels and perhaps our challenge is capacity and mismatch. As Ms McGuigan mentioned, the age friendly alliances bring senior stakeholders at local level together and get the agencies to start to break down the silos and work together. That is a critical piece.

At the other end, a role we introduced in County Louth called cúltaca involves working with older people to help them support themselves and produce their own plans. This is growing across the country with the service co-ordination model. It works in helping older people to see and plan early - it is a case of "a stitch in time, save nine" - so we can be more preventative rather than reactive in some of the situations. The capacity building we really need to work on is in middle management between the HSE and the local authority in terms of it becoming their job to work together and to be more integrated. That is something that is new.

The big challenge with regard to resources is whether we are introducing new money or if it is a case of pooling existing resources and trying to be more effective in sharing the budgets that are available and spreading them around. That is a challenge. We do not have a very good culture and history of pooling resources and perhaps we need to look at this aspect. It is a resource-contrained world so the key energies come back to empowering people to be able to do more for themselves and to be able to build on the huge resource value that is there in volunteering that comes in to help support that kind of work. It is cross-sectoral. We are on the journey but there is a lot of capacity building to do to be able to engage in that collaboration at a level that really does make a difference.