Deputies O'Shea and Crawford appear to be in agreement with me. The system is rather labyrinthine, as I have said time and again. The national monitoring committee of RAPID makes its pitch to various Departments. When I came to the Department and sought a list of all proposed actions, I was informed that, in the original strand, there were approximately 1,000. There are only, perhaps, ten or 12 Departments directly affected, excluding those such as the Department of Defence, which are not so involved. That represents an average of about 100 actions per Department and the Deputy will appreciate the difficulty of handling that amount.
Let us deal with the direction I wish to take, as I believe Deputy O'Shea may wish to do. I have always stated my belief that the RAPID programme, however well meaning it may be, is too labyrinthine in its modalities. With a target date for implementation at the beginning of next year, my intention is to separate all of the small issues which can be dealt with locally. For example, does a problem with a CCTV camera have to be referred to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, rather than being handled at local level? If an area needs to be landscaped to eliminate cider parties, is it really necessary to involve central government through the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government? I do not believe so.
We should separate the big issues from the smaller ones and provide a small leverage fund to deal with the latter on a local basis, somewhat analogous to the system which operates in the CLÁR programme. The remaining smaller number of major issues, which I believe would be of manageable proportions, would then be dealt with as between one Department and another. I have been known to favour an approach on the basis of Department to Department and, ultimately, Minister to Minister to resolve the bigger issues in debate, rather than using outside bodies to interact with Departments, as I believe the results tend to be better.