Mr. Peter Tyndall:

The issue around Covid is an interesting one. Ms Justice Ring will probably want to talk about the impact on the work of her office because it has been different for each of our offices. My office has what are known as "soft" phones, which essentially means that all of our phone lines can work from people's homes and we do not have to have people in the office to take phone calls on any of our numbers. Equally, we have the capacity to take complaints by email. We have a very well-used Twitter account where people approach us about complaints. We tend to direct them either to the phone or to the e-form on our website. We can take complaints in any number of formats. That has not changed.

We found there was a dip in complaint numbers initially but it picked up again. We have been able to deal with complaints more or less as efficiently as we had done when we were in the office. There are two changes that are important. One is that a lot of our work was outreach work. Every month we would have somebody in the citizens information centres in Cork, Galway and Limerick and people used that service. Some people liked to bring a file to us there or liked to come and talk to someone. Clearly we also had some business with people just coming into the main office in Dublin. We also had an extensive outreach programme with direct provision centres. We were about to introduce a similar programme for nursing homes. Where we have seen a reduction in complaints it is significant that the reduction in complaints has been in that outreach. We have had fewer complaints, for example, about direct provision. We have tried to provide outreach virtually. We have arranged for a room to be provided in direct provision centres where people can come to talk to us without being overseen by the staff in the centres. The reality was that a lot of the work we did in those centres was informal. A lot of the time a person might say "I cannot get a particular meal choice that suits my culture" and so on. We would just deal with it there and then. It did not show up in the formal complaints statistics but it was helping to make life better for people.

We have had specific complaints on the post-Covid situation. People first must complain to the body concerned. We have complaints at the moment such as visiting rights in nursing homes, as one would expect. We had a lot of complaints early on about the pandemic unemployment payment, just as it was settling down. We had very good co-operation with the Department and were able to resolve those quite quickly for people in general. If they were entitled to payments we made sure that they got them. There was confusion early on about the appeals mechanism but once that was properly put in place by the Department then the number of complaints coming to us reduced. We have also had to look at complaints about the leaving certificate calculated grades.

It has been different. People continue to complain to us. One of the things I always emphasise at committees is the role of Members of the Oireachtas in bringing complaints to my office. Many Members are very active in supporting constituents to complain. That is a very helpful route for us to make sure that things find their way to us that ought to.

In resource terms, not every office was the same. I am aware, for instance, that some of the offices have had to do things such as going in to listen to messages on answering machines because they were not able to divert their phones to people working at home. Some of us have had more challenges than others but it seems to me that everyone has risen to the challenge. They are all continuing to work and continuing to have an impact on improving the services they deal with.