Mr. Terence Connolly:

On the individual programmes, it is part of our role to ensure they are communicated correctly, that they are visible and that the logos are on everything. However, putting the logos on everything does not go far enough. The Welsh did that. I remember being in Cardiff and there are little plaques on nearly every building but it had no impact.

Particularly on the regional programmes the days of funding for road and rail are behind us as we become a wealthier country so the softer impact type things that are happening at the moment are just as important but they are not as visible and more diffuse. The Commission is very concerned about that. Something the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform has put in place is a centralised communication officer. There is now a person there to get everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet but a budget probably needs to be put behind that person to make sure they can do those larger scale advertising campaigns. The infrastructure is there.

On centralised information, there is the eufunds.iewebsite. It is an excellent one-stop-shop for people to see the menu of programmes out there.

However, much more promotion is required to get people to go to that website. On support at application stage, I will point out that there is a very good system in existence in Ireland, Enterprise Ireland's Horizon Europe support scheme. Horizon Europe projects tend to deal with multimillion euro projects but, as can be seen from some of the examples, there are also INTERREG projects of that scale. Under the Horizon Europe support scheme, small grants are given for the writing of applications. Some of the pieces of the jigsaw exist in Ireland but how to put them together and make them more impactful is a challenge ahead of us for the coming years.