Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I mention the OECD better life initiative, which closely shadows what our well-being indices will look like here. Under that initiative it is the civic engagement score that we rank lowest on. For some reason Irish people feel quite distant from their Government and I suspect that is to do with the under-empowering of local government for a number of years. That needs to be remediated, particularly when we look at the societal challenges we are facing. We need to be able to better engage with the populace to better explain our decisions, to have better public feed in and to have a participative democracy element. I have a slight and nagging concern that we do these open calls for submissions but I would like a sense of where those submissions are going and how they are informing what the final plan will look like. I would also like to have a sense of when we are likely to see that final plan.

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