Eileen Lynch (Fine Gael)
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I thank the president and Councillor Coughlan for their presentations. It was good to see them both yesterday. Councillor Coughlan is a former colleague. I also spent a brief period on the European Committee of the Regions earlier this year and I feel I have a good understanding of the valuable work it does.

Cohesion policy is obviously the big talking point. From their point of view, what should we be doing at a national level to help support the protection of cohesion? What strategies are working effectively in working with other delegations in a full European Committee of the Regions approach in the defence of that?

We, of course, talk a lot about cohesion but there are a lot of other EU funding mechanisms. What can we do to ensure that Ireland draws down its fair share of funding from those mechanisms? How can we make that more accessible to local authorities, in particular, smaller local authorities, because cohesion is very much were it is at but there are a lot of other competitive funding streams, and to ensure that we are getting our fair share of access to those?