Clare County Council comprises elected Councillors as well as Council staff. The councillors are responsible for making most of the decisions affecting the county, however they often take direction from the council staff and from other people with valuable expertise or experience.

In order to gather these voices together the Council runs four Strategic Planning Committees (SPCs), a Joint Policing Committee (JPC) and the Local Community Development Committee (LCDC). These committees – which have members from a variety of backgrounds – research, discuss and propose the actions they want the Council to take and then the elected Councillors vote on whether to adopt the policy decisions at a full Council meeting.

The PPN is responsible for holding elections and selecting the people from amongst its membership who will sit on these committees. These representatives then have the job of attending all the meetings of their particular committee and of bringing the concerns or ideas from the community groups in Clare into those meetings. They also have a responsibility to feed back whatever is happening to the people who elected them.