Ms Anne Marie O'Connor:

It is also a point we made in our submission. The community engagement point is very well made as well. As to whoever does it - it may not or should not be us, or maybe it should - it is worth giving consideration to, although bear in mind that the NPF is Government policy. Therefore, one would expect the Department will be the owners in respect of co-ordination of implementation. It is hard to co-ordinate or implement something that is so broad. It comes back to the point made previously on prioritisation. We need to be very clear what the key priorities will be for, say, the next five years and to focus the implementation and co-ordination on those.

The multi-agency approach is extremely important. It is one of the things we in the OPR do best. Regarding research we are conducting or whether we are doing a plan evaluation, we take a broad spectrum and try to bring a multifaceted approach to it and bring all the different State agencies involved. That is key; they have to be around the table. One of the most fruitful things I am involved in is we have a plan evaluation forum that the NTA, Uisce Éireann and the regional assemblies are on in order that we can all bring the different perspectives to achieving the same objective around the implementations of the NPF when we are talking about development plans.

Perhaps we could take this model and expand it at a broader, higher and more strategic level while focusing on key deliverables. This is probably the way I would approach it.