Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I hope the report will be finished by Easter. The task force has issued a very good document based on its travels throughout the country and, perhaps more importantly, on over 1,000 submissions. This has now gone into a format on the task force's website and also into wide circulation. In respect of the final draft, I presume it will depend on the type of feedback it gets. The task force is working to finish the report by Easter.

I said a number of things on the day of the launch. In respect of the particular comment mentioned by Deputy Rabbitte, I posed a question which is being explored by the task force. I acknowledged the amount of work that takes place in this country, where probably more people are involved in active citizenship than in most countries, although the numbers have declined according to surveys by the ESRI and others in recent years. In respect of the points I made on that and many other occasions, I do not think anyone can argue that Ireland has not changed greatly in the past 20 years.

Part of the reason the task force was established was to review the trends of civic participation and to ascertain whether the perception that many people have become more disengaged from our communities and neighbourhoods is true. This is the point made by many groups and organisations and if it is true, it is a question of why this exists. Obviously, there are more people at work, more people commuting and more people with young families who commute long distances. Is this the reason people have disengaged or are there other reasons? I was posing a question so that we can look at it and come forward with a report which examines what we can do if people have disengaged and are not connected with their localities or sports, cultural or historical clubs as they might have been in the 1950s when figures were high. These figures have declined since the 1950s and there has never been a bounce back period in the past 50 years.

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