Promoting Longer-Term Policy Thinking looks at ways of shaping and influencing the future rather than attempts to forecast it. The main focus is on improving the government`s capacity to identify and address key, strategic and cross-cutting policy issues with a longer-term perspective. Longer-term in this context means anything from five to fifty years in the future. Issues such as demographic change, competitiveness, transport and environmental problems, social inclusiveness and equity all have long-term implications. We need to be anticipating now what may need to be done in the future and what actions need to be taken now to best place Ireland to address such issues. Coherent and co-cordinated thinking about the future is essential in an increasingly complex global environment. This study identifies a number of constraints that impact on the adoption of longer-term policy thinking.