Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Briefly, on the question of integration I agree with the comments made by Deputy Rabbitte on education. For that reason, the Minister for Education and Science and her Department have put an enormous amount of teachers into these schools and into the language learning initiative to help with English skills in schools. It is working relatively well. Deputy Rabbitte mentioned his constituency. The benefit of it is that now the pupil-teacher ratio is low in a large amount of these schools, which helps greatly.

The difficulty with the membership was to find representation that would be reflective of the groups. It was extraordinarily difficult. It has not settled to a position and numerous groups exist. I talked to a number of them. A number of the organisations and groups have a section dealing with integration. Perhaps the expertise and the people involved might be used. To take one or two representatives from the ethnic groups would have caused me more problems that I was going to resolve. At one stage at least 20 organisations all had a case. As it develops, if some of the groups feel it is not representative enough, I will take the advice of Mary Davis on it. Many of those involved are people from sporting and youth groups who have done a very good job over the past decade in integrating ethnic groups into the organisations.

I see the timeframe for the work as being approximately a year. I do not want to fix a deadline. It will take time. We have set a target of nine months but even that will be tight. I think the work will take a year. It is more important that the group gets it right and sets out a blueprint for the future, building on the good things that are there, the best practices and what happens internationally. This issue happens all over the world. Most of our friendly neighbouring countries are also looking at this particular issue and involving people.

Voter participation was not one of the issues included. However, I suppose good citizenship has a knock-on effect on it. The group's terms of reference were more about trying to get the spirit of what works well in communities and urban and rural areas and building that citizenship. Building active and good citizenship certainly will have a plus side on people wanting to be involved and to participate. I hope it becomes a knock-on effect of it in the future.

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